C.O. In Paradise

During the so-called war in Vietnam I was a United States Army medic, but my experience was somewhat different than most medics because I was also a conscientious objector. Having previously served in the Peace Corps, and believing that the war violated my personal view of America, I entered the service classified 1-A-O. I was willing to serve, but I refused to carry a gun.

I trained at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. In basic training they kept the CO’s hidden away on a distant corner of the base, where our chicken-shit conscientious objector ideas could be properly controlled and contained. They didn’t want our seditious anti-war lies corrupting the killer instincts of the patriotic fighting men across the base. These were gung-ho warriors preparing to spill their guts rooting out commie gooks for Tricky Dick and his fellow cutthroats, and apparently they needed protection. So we peace-loving yellow-bellies were condemned to consort with none but our own kind. They saw us as cut from the same swath: timid, inexperienced, idealistic, God-fearing, goody-goody, church-going wimps. We must be kept from our diabolical mission: to seduce innocent patriots into joining us on a traitorous quest for world harmony.

In fact, I was none of those things. I was a long-haired, pot-smoking, agnostic son of a U.S. Marine who had convinced me that when we went to war every American had an obligation to serve his country. Guns were no mystery to me; I’d been shooting them since I was a kid. On the other hand, I was a friend of Zen, a meditating, Che-Guevara-loving vegan who would sooner rot in a jail cell than shoot a man on behalf of the corrupt, imperialist thugs who ran the country in those days.

I’ve often wondered about the non-coms and officers who were assigned to train that motley bunch of anti-warriors. It must have been a regular army man’s idea of hell on earth:

“Sergeant Jackson, you will hammer army discipline into the heads of those candy-ass objectors; you will mold them into fighting machines and prepare them to make war.”

“But Major, them boys are against war. How do you expect me to make killers out of ‘em?”

“I don’t know, Sergeant. I’d like to gutshoot every one of them chicken-liver bastards, but it says here we gotta train ‘em, and orders is orders. So train ‘em, Sergeant. Now move out.”


This is a shot of my brother Jim (left) and his buddy Raz. Old friends from high school, they got together while serving in Vietnam, 1966-1967.