Sweden, September 2019
50 years ago as of May 2019, two friends of mine and I demonstrated in a dramatic and non-violent way our heartfelt desire to help end the war in Vietnam. We defaced draft files, the paper files that were used to record the names and other personal details of those 18-year old boys/men who had signed up for the draft at that board, ie the ones who risked being sent to an illegal war in Indochina, to kill or be killed. Little could we then understand the repercussions of that act, reverberating through the decades since.
In practical terms it seems to me that our act in May of 1969 can have had little to no real effect on the number of soldiers actually sent to the war, and any local "shortage" due to our interference with the day-to-day business of the draft-board in Jesup Blair Park in Silver Spring, at the edge of Washington, DC, was certainly made up for by increased call-ups by other draft boards - somewhere else. Certain individuals were replaced with certain other individuals: ever hungering for new blood, the draft system was one weapon among many in the war machine, and that relentless hunter would not be deterred - until the People made it clear they would no longer tolerate that particular war.
Indications are that ours was the last in a series over several years of "stand-by actions": "stand-by" meant we waited for the police and FBI to arrest us, in order to attract attention to our anti-war protest and to the issues that drove us to act. From later in 1969 most or all draft-board actions were designed to palpably interfere with the draft law by literally eliminating all draft files, both locally held ones and centrally held copies in the state boards. As far as is known the draft system had all local files at local draft boards, and centrally held 3-by-5 cards - in each state - yet no federally held copies. Several of the actions from late 1969 on took on the task of eliminating not only the locally held original draft files of one or more boards but also the 3-by-5 cards held in the state board, and it is known that this effort succeeded in a few places. Regarding the effectiveness of this strategy, while it is also known that several million individuals' names were literally erased from the draft system, the elimination of every single local and central file in a particular place resulted once again in a redistribution of the manifold spectre of being sent off to war. The war machine’s hunger knew no bounds, and can always find new blood - as long as everyone else simply looks on.
Was it worth it? For myself it cost most of a year in prison, and exile for 50 years and counting. For most of our number, the cost was years spent in prison, and for most the lifelong elimination of many ordinary civil rights, for example the right to vote. For myself there have been unexpected costs as well, several of them alluded to in earlier (and yet-to-come) posts in this so-called blog. Speaking for myself and many others, and after many years as a physician and psychotherapist (recently as medical chief at Crisis and Trauma Center in Stockholm, Sweden, a small clinic - recently eliminated in Sweden's headlong and tragic rush to New Public Management - where we treated victims mostly of rape and torture) meeting, examining, understanding and treating victims of trauma including severe neglect, physical assault, rape, imprisonment and life-threatening torture, the personal hells and unwelcome teachers in our lives bend and shape us in ways that only the survivor can ever truly know. And the answer to the question is Yes it was worth it.
It is soon 45 years since the war in Vietnam ended - still the only one of America's constant wars that was stopped by the American population. Would it have been better to protest the war in some other way? Maybe. But the non-violent heart of most anti-war protest was and is the key to effective antiwar protest, ranging from point-tax-refusal (not paying the nationwide telephone-bill-surcharge that went to the Defense Department budget during the Vietnam war), to refusing induction into the military, to mass demonstrations, to the even more massive late-Vietnam-war-era Moratorium, to actions such as those of Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, together with journalists and publishers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wikileaks and many others who reveal wrong-doing - and the list could be much longer.
My mother-in-law, federal judge for many years, often says - even regarding acts that contravene current law, including civil disobedience - What's important is the price. While the price was high, finding the cost of freedom burns an indelible trail, an often phantasmagorical and intentional journey in every sense worth the fears and the failings and the sacrifice.
I was recently asked, nearing my 8th decade, if I would do it again. And my reply was: well of course not. I'm nearly 70 and would no longer dare what I once did. But in 1969 we were young and not afraid of risking our lives. The same person wondered if I thought my participation in an act of civil disobedience helped stop the war. And although the price is not yet paid-in-full, the answer is of course: maybe in some small way it did.
