Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  Basic training was from November to late January. I figured I’d be sent to Germany or something. I’d be a clerk, because they’d figure out I was just going to create problems in Vietnam, and I’m a college boy; I can type. But of course that didn’t happen. I got 11-Charlie. That means that you’re a mortarman. Eleven-Charlie is infantry mortar, which means you’re in the infantry platoon; you’re in combat.

  PHYLLIS MENKEN

  Sweden was giving political asylum and humanitarian asylum to American draft resisters and draft deserters, because Sweden was opposed to the war in Vietnam. We ended up in Stockholm applying for asylum and getting all kinds of social service support. We were given an apartment and Swedish lessons, free healthcare. We became enmeshed in this political network of people who were asylum seekers, people who were draft resisters and draft deserters, and we also coexisted with a subculture of immigrants from North Africa who were in the same language classes, in the same housing, in the same welfare lines, with absolutely nothing and completely dependent on the largesse of the state. There was this big underground economy and subculture, and there was a lot of illegal dealing going on, of drugs and goods. You’d go to your place to buy or sell and then the police would make a sweep a couple of times a day. Somebody would say, “Here they come,” and everybody would scatter. It was like a flock of crows and then everyone would settle back down again when they left and continue about their business.

  It was a kind of a tight community and the deserters were in really rough shape. They were lower-class, middle-America guys whose minds had been completely blown in Vietnam, and who said, “Get me out of here.” Where do I go, how do I go? How do I leave? And then of course they could leave Vietnam but they couldn’t get Vietnam out of their heads. So there was a tremendous amount of drug abuse, a tremendous amount of speed addiction. Sweden had this huge underclass and this huge drug culture. People would go down to Spain and they would buy all of these drugs and bring them back. They’d sell pharmaceuticals pill by pill. There was also a lot of hash and opium, and a lot of opium addiction.

  ABBIE HOFFMAN (Steal This Book)*2

  We feel it’s our obligation to let people know that life in exile is not all a neat deal, not by a long shot. You are removed from the struggle here at home, the problems of finding work are immense and the customs of the people are strange to you. Most people are unhappy in exile. Many return, some turn themselves in and others come back to join the growing radical underground making war in the belly of the great white whale.

  WESLEY BROWN (draft resister)

  There were a lot of young men who didn’t get CO [conscientious objector] status but were given some kind of community service that was short of going into the army. But given that I was in the Black Panther Party, and had used language that clearly was offensive to the authorities, they were not going to cut me any slack.

  Finally, after about another year or so, my lawyer Michael Standard got the call that I should report to a three-judge panel for sentencing, and the maximum penalty was five years. They were not going to listen to any speeches about my ethical stance on the war in Vietnam. So I went to court in Brooklyn with two friends and my mother and was sentenced to three years.

  I think my mother was in shock that I was actually going to jail. My parents felt that if I had taken a teaching job it would have shielded me, but getting involved with the Panthers pretty much sealed my fate in terms of there being any latitude that the court would have exercised in sentencing me. I knew that I wasn’t going to leave the country. I didn’t feel like that was an option for me. It was going to be hard enough for my parents as it was, but if I left the country, there was not a finite amount of time that I would be gone. With prison there was. I didn’t know how long the war was going to last. If my parents would have tried to see me if I left the country, I would be putting them in the position of aiding and abetting a felon. The feds probably would have put pressure on them. So I felt that if I was in prison, at least they would know where I was, and they could visit. And so as soon as I was sentenced, I was taken into custody and placed in a holding cell. I ended up spending eighteen months in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

  RANDY KEHLER

  We went to trial and I chose to represent myself because I wanted to speak for myself. I started out telling the jury right off the bat that I did what I was charged with doing. “I did refuse to obey a draft order,” I said, “but I want to tell you why.” I called my parents as character witnesses, thinking maybe I could get a little sympathy out of the jury. My father, Gordon Kehler, was a retired businessman. I was raised in a privileged Scarsdale, New York, family. My father never made much himself, but it was enough to live in Scarsdale. He was a Republican, although not really active, and he was a businessman; not a very successful one. But he was very dignified looking: His hair was silver. My mother was a mainstream American housewife from the forties and fifties. She was nominally a Democrat, but not involved in politics at all. There was no talk in our home, or in our schools, or in our church, about war, peace, pacifism, nonviolence. I never heard any of those words. I was raised, I think, with really decent values. You should be honest, always tell the truth, you should try to help other people, and be a good person.

  My father got up on the witness stand and I asked him, “What were the values that you and Mom tried to instill in us as children?” I have an older brother, and a younger brother, and a younger sister. My father took the cue, and he mentioned that killing is wrong. He totally blew my mind. He turns to this old judge, who was a World War II judge advocate general in Italy, postwar, and he was the only federal judge in Wyoming, a very powerful man, crusty old guy. My father, who could be just as crusty and was just as old, turned to him and said, “Your Honor, if you want to put somebody in prison, put me in prison. Because he’s just following what we taught him.” That was one of the most moving things that happened in all that time.

  RICK AYERS

  After you finish basic you go to advanced training. I got orders for Fort Polk, Louisiana, which is all Vietnam training because it’s just swamps there. So as soon as I got those orders, I started smoking cigarettes again, because I really didn’t think I was going to live. So I go to Fort Polk, Louisiana, which was really interesting. It’s the deep, bad South. It’s in a little town called Monroe, Louisiana. Here’s the kind of shit that would happen: First of all, the sergeants and lifers, who are supposed to be the big enemy because they kick your ass—the sergeants in the South were all black, southern guys, and they had already been to Vietnam, sometimes a couple of times. They were so antiwar. They would say to us, “You guys, this is bad. This is a bad deal.”

  So it wasn’t that kind of the sergeant-gung-ho-let’s-fight rhetoric I had expected to hear. Lieutenants who come out of ROTC, they’re more gung ho, let’s fight. The way the military is, lieutenants are supposed to be from the higher classes. Sergeants come out of the working class, they are like a foreman in a factory. So you know who got killed a lot in Vietnam? Second lieutenants, which were these college boys, because they were like, “Come on, men, let’s go,” and everyone else is like, “Fuck, no!” So the lieutenants got killed by their own people. There was a lot of fragging, mostly of second lieutenants. If you had a gung ho second lieutenant, he was dead.

  RANDY KEHLER

  Besides saying that I thought the war was a violation of international law, I cited chapter and verse, and I told the jury that international treaties ratified by the United States Senate, according to Article Five of the United States Constitution, are to be considered the “supreme law of the land.” I said, “This is not some little thing. And there’s been no declaration of war.”

  I had researched the concept of jury nullification, which I thought would be my ace in the hole. It goes back to the Peter Zenger trial, in the colonial days of New York. He was accused by the British, and taken to court for printing something the British considered libelous, or slanderous. But the jury acquitted h
im. My instruction to the jury in my trial, which I submitted to the judge, was “Even if you find that the defendant has violated the law as charged, you have the right to acquit the defendant based on other considerations.” The judge read it and said, “I’ll include that.” I thought, Oh my God. I’d been told no judge had ever agreed to tell that to a jury. I thought, Holy shit. This could be an incredible precedent for lots of people. So then he starts reading all the instructions to the jury, and he reads my instruction, too. But in the very next breath he says, “However, if you find that this defendant did in fact violate the draft law, you have no choice but to find him guilty as charged.”

  I rose up and I said, “Your Honor, I object.” He said, “Sit down. I will record your objection for the record.” Well, the jury—a good Wyoming jury—took no more than about forty-five minutes to find me guilty.

  The sentencing was right away and the judge said, “Well, since you would have had to serve two years if drafted, I’m going to sentence you to prison for two years.” Which was a very light sentence, considering. Then he said, “Do you have a preference as to which prison I send you to?” I was living in San Francisco. I said, “I have some friends who have already been sentenced to prison down in Safford, Arizona.” I was thinking of David Harris and a couple others. He said, “All right.” And he said, “Do you want me to have the federal marshals take you there, or will you show up under your own steam?” I said, “I’ll show up.” He said, “Okay,” and gave me one week to turn myself in at the prison, which I did.

  RICK AYERS

  You did these chants when you marched to stay in step. I don’t know but I’ve been told, streets of heaven are paved with gold. But there’d be different, political ones that were often antiwar. They called them cadences. Here’s one: Vietnam, Vietnam. Late at night when you’re sleeping, Charlie Cong comes a-creeping around in Vietnam. I mean, usually we didn’t even talk about Vietnam in training, except for things like “Don’t be a pussy.” Here’s another verse: You write your girl a letter, and then the guys repeat, You write your girl a letter; to you, she’s mighty dear. You’re wishing you were never, never here.

  The last one was You hear the bombs a-dropping. What is it? You think that they’re all gone, here comes another thousand Cong. And then the chorus: Vietnam…I get teary-eyed just saying it. It was so scary. These kids were going to die; you could just feel it. The big decision coming up for me by the end of March was, What am I going to do now?

  RANDY KEHLER

  Safford was a minimum-security federal prison. What helped me all along, even before I went to trial, was knowing that I had friends there, and they were surviving. Nobody was being beaten. There were no race riots or brutality. Federal prisons in general tend to have less of that than state prisons. So I felt sure I could do it, but I was still scared shitless.

  The next morning, my wife, Jane, drove me up to the door. We hugged and kissed goodbye, and cried. I dried my tears and walked in. It was just like any other big bureaucracy. I could have been walking into a hospital: There’s the registration line where you fill out these forms. We need your fingerprints, and let’s see your possessions, put them in this bag, and you’re assigned to this, and you have to wait for that, and you have to get shots for this. Here’s where you’re going to be living. It’s very routine. It’s probably like the first day of the military. You had to wear a military-type prison uniform.

  DAVID HARRIS

  We fucked around a lot. Visitors would come on the weekend, and every Monday people would get to the work site and scramble out into the woods where people had left all kinds of dope, so we were smoking a lot. At one point a guy came in who had been busted on dope charges. He was part of what was called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was a big Orange County acid manufacturing group. Orange Sunshine was the product of the Brotherhood of Love, who had kind of taken over the acid business after “Bear” Owsley [Stanley] went to jail. A week after that guy showed up, there was all this Orange Sunshine floating around and people taking acid. I never took acid in the joint, though. I’d smoke reefer anytime, but the thought of having to deal with these guys for twelve hours while I sparked up, no thanks.

  RANDY KEHLER

  We were in the desert, and there were no walls around this place—there wasn’t even a barbed-wire fence, but there were lines, a perimeter which you weren’t supposed to go beyond. If they knew you were gone, they would chase you down in jeeps with rifles and dogs. You would be wearing shoes with a pattern cut out of the sole, so they could track you better through the desert. You wouldn’t want to go out in the desert barefoot. One of the hard things about being in this prison—which I was only in for six months before I was sent to a much bigger, medium-security place—was that there were no walls, and there was even a road going right by it.

  We would say to ourselves, “Why do we stay here?” We could so easily have somebody pick us up and just be gone. I knew that none of my draft resister friends ever did that. There were three hundred prisoners there, of which maybe fifty were draft resisters. But half of them were Jehovah’s Witnesses, which is a different category. They were truly against war, true conscientious objectors, but they wouldn’t even apply for CO status, and they kept to themselves totally. It surprised me, I had thought the non-JW draft resisters would all be organizers, because we thought they were selectively prosecuting us.

  Out of the hundreds of thousands of people who were disobeying the draft law, it appeared that they were picking out key organizers who were in the public eye. Of which I was one, and David was one. But most of the guys there were not organizers. They were sweet, conscientious young men from all over the West Coast or Southwest who had just decided that they couldn’t cooperate.

  My wife, Jane, and David’s wife, Joan Baez, and another guy’s girlfriend used to drive down together to visit us, and one time they were outside the fences near the road. Joan and others were singing for us, so we sang back our strike song. We were on a food strike. I was playing away at the guitar. The guards broke it up pretty fast.

  * * *

  *1 Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions, distributed by Grove Press, 1971), p. 195.

  *2 Hoffman, Steal This Book, p. 197.

  CHAPTER 14

  DECEMBER

  (December 1–31, 1969)

  You can jail the revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution.

  —FRED HAMPTON, SPEECH,1969

  December 1969 was plagued by violence and despair. As bloodshed in Vietnam escalated, so did violence at home. The ranks of Americans who considered themselves “revolutionaries” swelled to as many as a million, and militant resistance threatened nearly all government institutions related to the war effort. Nonviolent civil disobedience of just months earlier, with the October and November Moratoriums, had evolved into violent clashes with police, rioting, arson, and bombings. In the fifteen-month period between January 1969 and April 1970, an average of fifty politically motivated bombings occurred each day.

  At the vanguard of this domestic rebellion was the Black Panther Party, which, in reaction to police brutality and FBI harassment, publicly declared war against the police. Two dozen Black Panther chapters had opened across the country, and in 1969 the police killed 27 Panthers and arrested or jailed 749. J. Edgar Hoover announced that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to [the] internal security of the country,” and he assigned two thousand full-time FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” the Panthers and other New Left organizations. In a 1969 speech to Congress, Hoover declared that the New Left was a “firmly established subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of our traditional democratic values and the principles of free government.”

  Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged on. From 1961 until 1971, the U.S. military dropped more than 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals—defoliants or herbicides, including Agent Orange—on 4.8 million Vietnamese. In 1
969, 11,780 American troops were killed, bringing the death toll to 48,736. It was not a festive Christmas for those in the peace movement. John Lennon and Yoko Ono displayed huge billboards in Los Angeles, London, and other cities that read: “War is over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” On New York City’s Fifth Avenue during the holiday shopping rush, a woman blocked the street with a sign that read, “How Many Shopping Days Until Peace?”

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  (student, University of Wisconsin–Madison)

  I remember sitting in the student union with my brother Dwight and watching news accounts of the My Lai massacre, and I couldn’t believe our country had sunk to such low depths. Even before the My Lai story came out, I had come to the realization that we were basically fighting these peasant people in Vietnam, and it was a very asymmetric sort of war, using all of this technology and bombs, killing hundreds of thousands of people who were basically fighting back with limited resources.