New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
_____________________________________________
by Larry L. Dill
The Reece Correspondence.
(Charles Reece and his wife, Marilyn, had become close friends of Melba's and mine in the fall of 1967 when we moved back into married student housing (which consisted of salvaged World War II army barracks) at the University of Texas. Charlie was a conservative Baptist bound for a career at IBM in Dallas and I was hurling myself headlong into a life of bohemianism. We hit it off immediatly. By the spring of 1968 we had both moved out of the barracks. Charlie had landed his IBM job and I was writing poetry on the banks of the Colorado River in Austin. What follows are the last surviving letters between us that are in my possession.)
March 18, 1968
Dear Charlie,
I hope this letter finds you rich and famous and in perfect health. I am sorry we did not make it to Dallas between semesters. I took a weekend job for about a month during that period.
I have decided to claim exemption from the military on the grounds that I am conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form. I have enclosed a copy of the most important questions on the draft board questionnaire and my answers to them. I have tried to state my views as honestly and clearly as possible. I hope my position is clear to you even if you do not agree with me.
If you feel that I am sincere in my claim, I would appreciate your writing a letter to my draft board to that effect—and mailing it to me. My board is no. 7 in San Antonio. It is not necessary that you agree with my views. The important thing is that you believe I am sincere in my claims.
This is a very serious claim and a serious request. If you feel that you cannot in good conscience write such a letter I will understand. This is certainly a time for honesty.
We hope to see you and Marilyn before too long…but my future is rather unstable. As Benjamin put in in the Graduate, “I’m a little worried about my future.”
Sincerely,
Larry
709 West Lynn
Austin
IBM Corporation
7701 Stemmons Freeway
Dallas, Texas 75247
March 26, 1968
Larry,
I was glad to hear from you, but I was disappointed to see that those extra pages were not part of your letter! That is about all the patter I have to put at the beginning of the letter before I get serious…
While this is not a definite yes or no, it does mean that I am seriously considering your plight!!! I have one or two questions to ask you before I decide.
First, let me say that I do not doubt your sincerity. I have, believe it or not, given some thought to this same question myself. My 1-Y was given to me in 1963 and I feel that there is a good chance that my classification could be changed.. This would put me in worse shape than you are in at the present. Of course, your problem is much more pressing.
Larry, would you tell me as honestly as you can, whether you would be willing to serve elsewhere if you were drafted anyway and were ordered to serve out your time at a hospital or whatever, as some have been. This is important to me, and I would appreciate your decision.
Secondly, do you know how much checking the Army does when they get these letters? I would think that they might be rather thorough. I ask because there’s the chance that my own classification might become altered as a result of it, and I have already decided that although I may not agree with the consequences, I will serve if required to do so. Because of this, I am very interested in possible outcomes of my action. I do not mean to say that I would rather not write, or anything like that, but I thought that you might have more access to information having a direct influence on my possible problem as mine influences yours. I intend to ask here, too, but I imagine that Austin and people you know are better informed than Dallas and people I know.
Anyway, I hope that this doesn’t sound like an “alibi-like” letter, but I too am concerned with my status with the military.
If you will answer what questions you can and send me another whopper of a letter, I will answer your original request. Regardless of the final outcome of your effort, I hope you have everything turn out fine. Say hi to your wife for the both of us and we hope that you can make it up to see us before too long.
Hope to be writing about more pleasant things soon,
Charley & Marilyn
March 29, 1968
Dear Charley,
I was very happy to get your letter. I’m sorry that my first one was so short. At the time I had one thing on my mind and could not make conversation about anything else. I considered going into a short history of my decision and what exactly I intended to do in the event of certain actions by the board, but that would have taken pages of explanation. I was writing letters to some fifteen persons requesting letters of recommendation and each one knows me in a different way and would have required a special kind of explanation. I then hit upon the idea of just telling you exactly what I had told my draft board. That would let you know where I stood with them (that is, what they knew about me) and it would save mea a lot of work.
I realize now that it was a rather impersonal way of proceeding and I will certainly give you my position as fully as I can. First, let me say that your comment about once considering conscientious objection yourself only served to reinforce my feeling that what I am doing is expressing the deep seated feelings of most of my friends and, indeed, most of mankind. I do not interpret your letter as an alibi. On the contrary, I see just the opposite of aan unconcerned person trying to avoid confrontation with a draft board.
Everyone, Charles, is worried about his draft board. Why? Because the draft system in America is unjust. And we all want to be treated justly. It is impossible to be treated justly by a system which asks people to kill innocent human beings and allow themselves to be killed. Your life is the most important thing in this matter and if you are a Christian you believe that every human life is of infinite value.
Because the system we are dealing with is unjust, there can be no just or unjust way of working within it. You must just do whatever you can to save yourself and others from an unjust confrontation with death. That of course includes staying out of the service the best way you can.
If when I go for my physical (which I will have to do even while my classification is pending) I receive a 1-Y, I will probably accept it. Then I will be in exactly your position. I will accept it because it will be the easiest way to save my own life…not the only way, but the easiest. A 1-Y will give me complete freedom to go where I want and do what I want…something I have not been able to do since I was born. That freedom is too important for me to pass up for an ideal.
But the ideal, what I see as the right thing to do, is still looming over me like a great cloud. My conscience thells me that what I ought to do is to simply refuse any sort of cooperation at all with the draft system and go to jail for my convictions. I have not yet said no to that voice. I may still go to prison, because I know that that is what I ought to do. My conscience tells me that if I had been a young boy living in Nazi Germany I should have refused to fight knowing that it meant death. Whether I would have made that decision or not I cannot say. But I do know that it would have been the right decision. For if every German man who was against the waq (and most were) would have refused to fight, there would have been no World War. Likewise, I believe that if every man in America who is against war would refuse to go, the war would end tomorrow.
My pragmatism, which for the most part rules my life, tells me that everybody is not going to do that, therefore, my doing it is not going to end the war. But all over the country there are men who are making just that decision. If I choose to go to war because I think it is the practical thing to do, I am a full partner in this crime against humanity. If I refuse to go, I am joining the human race.
That is how strong my line of reasoning goes. If my body were as strong as my mind (if my will were as strong as my mind) I would say to you that without a doubt I am going to jail or leaving the country to prove my conviction. At this point I cannot say that that is what I will do. I will not make the final decision until I am finally faced with the induction papers and know that I have no other recourse.
To answer your question about alternate service: There are two kinds. One kind is non-combatant service within the armed services. I will definitely refuse that kind of classification. With my college degree I would probably not have been a combat soldier anyway. They will more than likely offer me this route since it would be no sweat to them. They need 10 men doing paper work for every 1 on the battlefield. But that would defeat my whole purpose. And I would still be doing as much for war as if I were firing a gun.
The other alternative is two years of non-military service in some civilian organization which promotes the national health and welfare. Because I am not opposed to a government service program for young people and will welcome the day when all young people will serve their country for a couple of years to help eliminate poverty, disease and ignorance, I will accept this kind of service. Again, projecting my decision on a grand scale, I forsee the day when thousands of men take this route and the world will be a better place for their having done it.
Your second question was “Will the army investigate you?” No…but the FBI will. I do not know how extensively they will go into your background because they will be looking for stuff on me. If my case goes to the state and it will unless I get my CO classification at my personal appearance (I have already been denied at the initial board hearing) they will come to see you as they will everyone I listed as a friend and everyone who ever lived next door to me. The FBI investigation of me will be very thorough. But there are no legal ways that they can hold anything against you because you are a friend of a CO. They will visit everyone with whom I correspond and everyone I work with.
The reason I wrote to you Charles, and I had no idea I would be putting you in a moral delimma, was because I thought that you would be in favor of the war and against what I was doing. That would have given you a strong position in my case. You see, the board is always impressed if someone writes a letter for a CO applicant and states in the letter that they do not share the applicants views but feel that he is sincere. This puts you on the board’s side on the issue but on the applicants side as to sincerity.
I sense, however, in your letter that you could not in good conscience say that you disagree with the applicants views or his sincerity and if your draft board found out that you were actually opposed to the war they might draft you.
Realizing that your views are much closer to mine than I thought, I think it would be best for you not to write a letter. The final decision, of course, is up to you. But I do feel that unless you are willing to go all the way yourself, you ought not to put yourself in jeopardy. You are my friend and I want to help you get out of this shit as much as I want you to help me. I don’t think a letter from a friend who shares my views will really help much anyway.
I am much happier knowing that your views about war are similar to mine, if indeed they are, than I would be to have a letter attesting to my sincerity but disagreeing with my views. After all, the most important thing at issue here is whether or not we believe in murder.
In closing let me say that I hope this incident has made us closer friends and thus more in tune with what most of our aspirations are all about, namely, loving our fellowmen as brothers rather than treating them as objects to used and thrown away. I think there are a lot of things that you and I never got around to talking about because we were too busy with trivialities. That is the way with most human relationships. Ant it is a tragedy of our culture. Maybe we can cut across some of that stuff and get down to some of the things that really bother us.
With your approval we would like to visit you on the weekend of the 20th or 27th (tentatively) of April. We will be as broke as ever but perhaps we can do some free things like a picnic or sem in the country or tour the International Business Menace. Will be waiting to hear from you.
Larry
Go to Chapter Two: "Haven't We Heard Enough? The Selective Sevice Board Appearance
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