New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
_____________________________________________
Confessions of a sort of a Conscientious Objector 1960-1969
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
--From “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller
My time in Korea was pleasant enough physically. As the assistant company clerk I bunked in a room with the company clerk and the supply clerk. For $10 a month I could have a Korean civilian do my laundry, keep my boots shined and make my bed every morning. Technically, such services were only available to officers. The regular enlisted riflemen were not allowed such privileges. But since soldiers like me whose MOS (military occupational specialty) was an actual 8 to 5 office job rather than the make work projects that combatants who are not actually in combat must endure, then shining shoes, doing laundry, and cleaning your rifle, were ways of taking your mind off the tedium. For those of us who had a regular work routine, military life was not that much different from civilian life. It was, for me anyway, being in a foreign country as we were, culturally interesting. We had on base recreation facilities of all types. Ball fields, gyms, a bowling alley, a library, and even a movie theater. At the EM Club, beer was 25 cents a bottle and cigarettes were a dime a pack.
Next to the base was a small village with serpentine dirt streets, tiny shops (where for example I bought a bootleg copy of the Beatles’ Abbey Road), tea houses and cafes and a half dozen American style bars complete with loud rock and roll music and a legion of pretty young Korean prostitutes.
I was in Korea from the summer of 1969 until the end of the year. My tour of duty was to last for a year but as you will see, I got out early.
The war in Vietnam was raging and the anti-war movement was raging in the United States. Those of us holed up in Korea were missing both the war and the dissent. I tried to occupy my mind with the books in the library and with observing the local culture when I could. I even tried to teach myself Korean. I was fascinated with Korean peasant culture—the way tiny ancient women could squat beside a road and with a few sticks and blades of grass build a fire and prepare a simple meal of rice and fish. I remember walking out into the countryside one day and watching an old man cultivating a little garden, maybe 8x10 on a high terrace cut into the side of a steep mountain. And I remember watching a building being built on the base by local peasant contractors who hauled loads of concrete for the foundation on a-frame packs on their backs. In fact everything under the sun was hauled in this fashion. You might see a man going down the road with half a pick up load of firewood strapped to his back. You might see another man hauling kerosene or gasoline the same way.
For most of the soldiers there with me, though, life in Korea was as boring as watching paint dry and some really became so bored and restless that they would show up at company headquarters where I worked and ask to be transferred to Vietnam where they knew they would not be bored. It was my job to type up and file such routine requests for transfers. At first I simply followed the paper trails wherever they led. But as I became more comfortable in my job, I would sometimes place Vietnam transfer requests in a bottom drawer of my desk and “forget” about them. I thought of it as my small way of saving a young soldier’s life. Sometimes a soldier would come back in a month later and want to know if I’d heard anything. I would shrug and say, “These things take time you know.” Once, though, a boy I recall as being only about 19, came rushing back into my office after only a week or so wondering if I had filed his paper work for the transfer to Vietnam. “Why do you ask?” I said. “Well, I think maybe I’ve changed my mind,” he said, nervously. “Hmmm. Let’s see,” I said as I fumbled with my little purgatory file. “Oh, hey we’re in luck,” I said, pulling out his request and handing it to him. He sighed a sigh of relief and tore the request in half. “I met this girl in the village. And anyway I figured I could stay around here a little while longer.”
There were other ways of dealing with the boredom, too. Some of these younger kids were little more than juvenile delinquents, not handling their drugs and alcohol, getting into fights, talking back to their sergeants, not reporting back on time from leave. For minor infractions they would be unofficially disciplined—extra chores like KP (kitchen patrol), mopping the barracks or cancelled weekend passes. Some times these punishments worked and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes these young offenders would be court martialed and sent to the stockade. If the offense was serious enough, the jail sentence might be followed by a dishonorable discharge. One of the ways people deliberately got out of the Army was to commit an act of insubordination that would lead to a dishonorable discharge—a fairly severe penalty in itself in that it carries a social stigma that in some instances might cause a person to have more difficulty in finding employment than if he were a civilian convicted felon.
But as I was to discover, there was still another way of dealing with troublemakers.
As a company clerk my job was to maintain the files and records of the soldiers in our unit following carefully delineated instructions in a massive set of Army Regulations that were themselves always changing and required as much time and effort to maintain as the personnel files themselves.
Changes in the regulations (which were kept in dozens of 3 ring binders) would come in almost daily from US Army Headquarters in Washington, DC. Sometimes the changes would merely involve substituting a new page for an old one. At other times the change would involve making a hand written notation on an existing page that instructed the reader to see a revision, addition or deletion on a specific page at the end of a section where the new document would be placed.
On a couple of occasions I had the responsibility for typing up personnel separations under Army Regulation 635-212 (“Discharge Unfitness and Unsuitability”). Once I read the regulation through a few times in preparing a discharge request for a habitual drug offender in our company, it began to dawn on me that my own history of conscientious objection, though not mentioned in the regulation, might qualify me for an honorable back door exit from the Army. “Catch-212,” as I began to call it, was exactly the opposite of Joseph Heller’s fictional “Catch-22.” In Heller’s book the Army didn’t want you if you were crazy but in fact you had to be crazy to want to be in the Army. If you claimed that being in the Army was driving you crazy, you were just proving that you were sane. So there was no way to use an insanity defense to get out. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” Yossarian observed.
I had read “Catch-22” before going into the Army and was aware that the central idea of the book was that war is a form of psycho-social pathology. But here I was now pouring over this real world military regulation that suggested that for rational reasons of military order and morale, the US army in 1969, with enormous numbers of draftees abroad and growing disaffection at home, was determined to maintain order and discipline by discharging misfits of every stripe as quickly and unceremoniously as possible.
Under the provisions of AR 635-212 there were two basic conditions under which the regulation could be used to discharge a soldier before his term of duty was up: “Unfitness” or “Unsuitability,” one or the other. “Unfitness,” the harsher of the two categories could be adjudged for “frequent incidents of a discreditable nature with civil or military authorities, sexual perversion (including indecent exposure and child molestation), drug addiction or merely possession, “an established pattern of shirking,” (something Buckner and I had tried to make a high art out of in boot camp), or failure to pay child support or other debts. An Unfitness judgment under AR 635-212 would likely result in an Undesirable Discharge unless you were a decorated soldier in which case you could receive an Honorable Discharge (your military heroism presumably trumping your social sins!).
But the category that intrigued me most was Unsuitability which was a catch-all category that included “inaptitude,” “apathy,” alcoholism, bedwetting, homosexuality and the mother of all catch-alls, “character and behavior disorders.” The worst case scenario of such a judgment was a General Discharge Under Honorable Conditions. AR 635-212 did not define a character or a behavior disorder other than as “defined by medical authority.”
“Medical authority” in 1969 relied (as I understand now in 2005) on the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (referred to hereafter as the DSM.) The DSM was first published in 1952. The expanded DSM-II had just been released in 1968, the year before I went into the Army. It would appear on the surface that military mental health professionals were tapping into the best civilian diagnostic techniques, but as you will see below, the DSM in the civilian world actually has its roots in the US Army. Like IQ tests and Computers, modern psychiatric evaluation standards are based originally on the goal oriented needs of military research and development.
Of course there in Korea in 1969 I had not heard of the DSM and so had no way of knowing exactly what it was that the Army relied on to determine “character and behavior disorders” other than conventional psychiatry. I had read a bit of Freud and the Marxist psychoanalyst Eric Fromm and almost instinctively honed in on the words “character” and “behavior” as value laden, almost literary terms rather than medically pathological. Taken along side “unsuitability,” homosexuality,” and “apathy” (defined by the regulation as “defective attitudes and inability to expend effort constructively”), “character and behavior disorders,” could mean anything that I do that you don’t like, or more specifically that the Army doesn’t like.
“Psychiatry,” as is now well known, was the primary instrument through which political dissidents in the Soviet Union were neutralized. Well I had read Solzhenitsyn too, and Kafka and of course Heller.
Something came over me. You could call it insanity or you could call it imagination or you could call it a plot. I saw myself suddenly as a prisoner, a slave. In the south after Reconstruction, the laws were rewritten to create a new black slave class inside the penal system.
To a large extent the Selective Service regulations under which I had been drafted weighed most heavily on blacks and other poor minority classes. Not only the south but the US federal government had created from its own citizenry a predominantly minority slave class of indentured servants who through no recourse were incarcerated and made to comply with all military orders including the murder of other human beings when necessary for a set number of years, usually two, in order to gain once again what was already theirs by birthright, their freedom and their human rights.
I sat down one night in mid November, having been in the Army for only ten months and wrote the following letter to my commanding officer:
November 17, 1969
Dear Captain Lang,
In February, 1969, I was drafted into the United States Army against my conscience and in violation of my rights as a human being. For several years prior to my induction I pondered what I should do if faced with the situation of possible induction. I thought seriously about conscientious objection and did some reading in connection with my thoughts. I concluded after several months of contemplation that I was in fact a conscientious objector by selective service standards. I filed my application and it was rejected. I then went before my local board in person to appeal my case. I was again rejected.
By that time, in the spring of 1968, I was thoroughly convinced that war was wrong and compulsory service against one’s conscience was the gravest form of totalitarianism. When those in control of a nation have no respect for the deepest religious convictions of a man—especially when those convictions serve to affirm life over death—then they have no right to govern.
Several failures to channel my convictions into accepted Selective Service standards for deferment led me to a final confrontation with the Army or a prison sentence. Being human and being weak I chose what seemed to be the easy way out. I tried to forget my
conscience and my integrity and compromise my morality by accepting the Selective Service order. I signed a statement giving up my inalienable rights and put on the uniform of a soldier.
At the time I felt that two years of such an abdication would ease my troubled mind if not my conscience. I thought perhaps I might use my two years in the Army as a lesson in the misuse of power by one human being over another. Through Basic and Advanced training I sought to be objective, uninvolved and unquestioning. I came to Korea with one thought in mind: to finish what I had mistakenly started without incident or revocation.
In the succeeding months, however, I have tried unsuccessfully to hold back an ever increasing tide of mental anguish. I have watched quietly the degrading and inhuman way men have been treated by my superiors. I have worked faithfully at my typewriter in an effort to avoid my own confrontation with these men and to prevent deep and serious thought about my own participation in their transgressions. I have sacrificed my own creative instincts, my personal pride and dignity, and my piece of mind to serve my more pressing desire for ultimate freedom. In all this I have been wrong. My will to work for the Army has degenerated to a point where I must now write these lines in personal defense and compassionate plea for release. I have developed a constant uneasiness in my stomach and I have become a chain smoker. My attempts to teach English through the Education Center have ended in complete mental confusion. For in thinking about anything deeply, I find my mind filled with the sickness that surrounds me. I try to write poetry and my only subject is the injustice I see. I talk with friends and all conversations end with a tirade of my feelings of hollowness and hypocrisy.
I have no desire to go to jail but I fear that unless I am discharged from the Army for reasons of mental health, I might well become an outlaw committing the simplest violations of military justice not willfully but out of inordinate despair.
I ask that I not be subjected to such mental strain. This statement now is a prelude to my immediate future. Certainly no responsible military authority could give reason why I should be forced into complete mental breakdown.
I have served the Army well, but time has broken down the barriers I had erected around my mind and the forces of destruction are moving quickly toward my demise. I am no longer of value to the Army or myself. I must be given peace and freedom.
Sincerely,
Larry L. Dill
Go to Part 2 of Chapter V: "What's Going on here, Private Dill?"
Return to New Hope Journal Home Page
Copyright 2005 by Larry L. Dill
All Rights Reserved
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com