New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
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Confessions of a sort of a Conscientious Objector 1960-1969
In writing this story 35 years after the fact, I asked a friend of mine, a librarian, to find me the original Army Regulation 635-212 as it stood in 1969. And he did. And though I couldn’t get my hands on the DSM-II that was in effect in 1969 I began to read the DSM-IV that I found in my own local library. First of all I wanted to know where the damn DSM had come from and secondly I wanted to see if I could identify any specific malady that Captain Schmidt might have had in mind when he “certified” me as severely deficient in personality development.
In the front of the DSM-IV I found the following:
The American Psychiatric Association collaborated with the New York Academy of Medicine to develop a nationally acceptable psychiatric nomenclature designed primarily for diagnosing inpatients with severe psychiatric and neurological disorders.
A much broader nomenclature was later developed by the US Army (and modified by the Veterans Administration) in order to better incorporate the outpatient presentations of World War II servicemen and veterans (e.g. psychophysiological, personality and acute disorders.)
Contemporaneously, the World Health Organization (WHO) published the sixth edition of ICD (International Classification of Disease) which for the first time included a section for mental disorders. ICD-6 was heavily influenced by the Veterans Administration nomenclature and included 10 categories of psychosis, 9 for psychoneurosis, and 7 for disorders of character, behavior and intelligence.
The American Psychiatric Association Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics developed a variant of the ICD-6 that was published in 1952 as the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders (DSM-1).
Glancing through the DSM for anything that might make sense in my case I found the following, military related entry:
The essential feature of Malingering is the intentional production of false or grossly exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms, motivated by external incentives such as avoiding military duty, avoiding work, obtaining financial compensation, evading criminal prosecution or obtaining drugs. Under some circumstances, Malingering may represent adaptive behavior—for example feigning illness while a captive of the enemy during wartime.
Malingering should be strongly suspected if any combination of the following is noted:
1. Medicolegal context of presentation (e.g. the person is referred by an attorney to the clinician for examination).
2. Marked discrepancy between the person’s claimed stress or disability and the objective findings.
3. Lack of cooperation during the diagnostic evaluation and in complying with the prescribed treatment regimen.
4. The presence of an antisocial personality disorder.
Malingering differs from Factitious Disorder in that the motivation for the symptom production in Malingering is an external incentive, whereas in Factitious Disorder external incentives are absent. Evidence of an intrapsychic need to maintain the sick role suggests Factitious Disorder. Malingering is differentiated from Conversion Disorder and other Somatoform Disorders by the intentional production of symptoms and by the obvious external incentives associated with it. In Malingering (in contrast to Conversion Disorder), symptom relief is not often obtained by suggestion or hypnosis.
Pathologizing what might well be a rational act of human survival or moral courage seems all the more outrageous given the knowledge that many of the civilian DSM’s categorizations have their origins in the US Army’s attempt to psychologize any point of view outside its own institutional ideology. This is precisely what happened in the Soviet Union.
I mean look at what the findings of my psychiatric Certificate say:
a.) I’m morally competent. b.) I’m mentally competent. c.) I’m both physically and mentally healthy enough to be retained in the Army. And I’ve done nothing illegal.
But d) and e) both seem to be talking about somebody else. It is like a narcissistic man saying to a woman who wants out of a relationship, “You’d have to be crazy to want to leave me.”
I didn’t see the Certificate for several long and dreadful weeks. As Capt Lang had predicted Sergeant Wilkins, a foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, alcoholic asshole of a Sergeant-Major was indeed pissed off when he found out about my letter. He transferred me out of his office and into a regular rifle company. I lost my privileged semi-private room and my Korean valet, was moved in to a room with 10 virtual strangers and was made to go through the daily routines of the somnambulant grunts whose mistreatment I written about so forcefully in my letter.
I felt sick all the time and was so filled with anxiety about my fate that I was sick. Still I was forced, literally forced, once even dumped out of my bed by an enraged platoon sergeant, to act as if every thing were normal.
In the Army a soldier nearing the end of his tour of duty is called a “short-timer.” It is an ambivalent label. For even as soldiers in Iraq in 2005 at this writing know, the Army can change your orders and your fate in the blink of an eye. So, the shorter the time that a short-timer has, the more anxious he becomes under the best of conditions. If he is actually having to go into battle right up to the day before he is to leave, the pressure can be unbearable.
I didn’t think I was in danger of being killed. But I had no orders. I didn’t know if I was going to be court-martialed, reassigned, set free or just left indefinitely in limbo. I was shunned by Capt Lang, Sergeant Mays and anyone who might know anything. The closest friend I had during the fall of ’69 was the supply clerk, Kenneth Townes who, ironically, was exhibiting behavioral traits that were contributing to my own anxiety.
Townes and I had gone to Seoul together on a weekend pass a couple of months earlier and after looking over the depressing accommodations at the USO center there has sprung for a nice hotel room in an American style hotel. Townes was not a soul mate like Buckner had been but we hung out together because we were roommates and fellow clerks. Townes had the idea that once we got into this hotel we’d be able to “order up a girl” as it were, and though I had my doubts (and besides had already had my little village fling) I went along with his fantasy until it became clear that nobody in the hotel that we could find was going to broker a call girl for us, Townes became morose and the rest of the weekend was pretty much ruined.
I had discussed my 212 plans briefly with Townes just after I wrote my letter to Captain Lang and just as a light had gone on in my head when I first read AR 635-212, Townes began to plot his own 212 discharge. To put it mildly, he handled his case a little differently than I had. First of all, he had no interest in conscientious objection or the anti-war movement, etc. He just didn’t like being penned up in the Army.
So instead of writing a Dostoevskian jeremiad as I had, he simply walked out into the street in front of an oncoming jeep carrying a General from Brigade Headquarters. The jeep swerved (this according to eyewitness accounts) and ran into a building, landing the General in one of the drainage ditches that ran along side every street on the post.
Sergeant Mays told me on the day he gave me my departure orders that the General tried to have Townes arrested on the spot but instead ordered a psychiatric evaluation which lead to Townes transfer to Division headquarters where he was being processed for a 212 discharge.
The last thing I remember about Sergeant Mays was the smile he had on his face as we said goodbye. Mays had been scheduled to go home before either of his roommates, Townes or me, and now it looked like he would have a room of his own for a while and Ken Chi, our houseboy, would be out of $20 a month until our replacements arrived.
Captain Schmidt’s psychiatric report went back to Colonel Casey who wrote a recommendation for my 212 discharge as follows dated December 8, 1969.
1. Recommend approval.
2. Subject EM has been formally counseled on several occasions in regards his Behavioral Disorder. It is indicated that this EM has a deficiency in personality development of such a severity that rehabilitative measures would not correct the immediate problem. His only concern at the moment is to be discharged from the service.
3. I feel that further rehabilitative efforts will be futile, that Dill will continue the pattern of his past behavior and that valuable time will be wasted by all in the chain of command if he is permitted to stay in the Army.
William Casey
LTC Infantry
Commanding
The next day, the Brigade Commander wrote the following letter to the Commanding General at Division Headquarters. I never found out if it was the General whom Townes had dumped in a ditch.
1. Requirement for counseling and rehabilitative reassignment is waived.
2. Private First Class Larry L. Dill will be discharged for Unsuitability. Authority for discharge will be cited as paragraph 15, AR 635-212, SPN 264.
Arnold Henderson
Colonel, Armor
Commanding
The week before Christmas I got a copy of everything including this line from the memo from Division: “This Headquarters will publish appropriate orders and obtain a port of call for the individual.”
“You’re going home next week,” Sergeant Mays told me on Christmas Eve. “Merry Christmas, you motherfucker,” he smiled.
I had no way to call home. Nobody at home, really, to call. My parents had no idea what I was doing. I wrote them a letter that night that said simply that I was being discharged for conscientious objection (a story I’ve used ever since to explain my abbreviated military service). I hoped they’d understand. And I wrote a letter to my estranged wife, Melba. I don’t remember whether or not I actually mailed either letter. And no copies survived. I did write an essay called the Crossing on my way home that summed up my life through the 60’s, available here as an appendex.
On Christmas day I ate turkey and dressing alone at a table in the mess hall. The place was almost deserted. Everyone was whooping it up in the village, I guessed. The day after Christmas I went down to Division Headquarters where I was ordered to get a haircut before going home.
At Ft. Lewis, Washington, I spent a day or two having my papers processed. Someone stole my field jacket (the one thing I wanted as a souvenir) when I went to lunch on New Years Eve.
My discharge was effective the next day, January 1, 1970. I rode a military bus to the Seattle International Airport, arriving 4 hours before my flight at noon. I had thought about just walking off the base and working my way down the west coast to California. But if you wore your military uniform, the Army would pay your way home. I felt like I needed to go home.
I got drunk in the airport bar waiting for my flight to Austin. I fell asleep in the waiting area. A sweet black woman woke me up. “Hey, honey, this your plane?” she said, gently slapping me on the cheeks. I stumbled on to the plane and wrote love poems on napkins to one of the stewardesses. I remember her and her co-workers laughing over my notes as they huddled in the forward cabin of the plane making backward glances at me. Another drunken Vietnam War Era veteran going home. This one lucky, confused and very relieved. Within 6 months I would start a family with a woman I had not yet met. But that’s another story.
--Larry L. Dill
Rabbit Rock, N. C.
May 1, 2005
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