The Drifters (3 page)

But Joe could get angry, and on the last day of the year he did just that. In fact, he flew into a storming rage, cursing and kicking the furniture about his room. The occasion for his rage was deceptively simple: he received a letter. It was of no consequence, just a routine note, wishing him a Merry Xmas, from the girl who had invited him to La Jolla. What evoked his fury was the government cancellation on the letter:
Pray for Peace.

‘That’s what’s wrong with the whole damned country,’ he fumed. ‘On our letters we stamp “Pray for Peace,” to prove that we’re a peace-loving nation. But let one miserable son-of-a-bitch do anything about peace, and they bust him over the head with clubs. What has happened? When those townspeople were in the quadrangle the other day they actually hated … they could have killed my roommate … because he wanted peace.’

Alone in his room, he remembered a lecture given by one of the young professors: ‘The United States is the most militaristic country on earth. Newspapers, television, universities and even the churches are dedicated to warfare and any voice that speaks out against it has to be silenced. You will notice that newspapers refer to anti-war spokesmen as “the so-called peaceniks.” Cartoonists depict them as lunatics. Television commentators speak of them as rioters and scum who should be driven from the streets. Our nation feels it has to destroy the peace people because it knows that to keep our country functioning, we must have war. Not for economic reasons, for spiritual ones.’

Joe recalled a conversation he once had with a music major: ‘This university has a very good conservatory. Our teachers can put on damned good opera. But do you know how the board of regents judges the department? How good the marching band is? If a hundred and fifty young men and women in military uniform swing onto the football field between halves, and keep step, then the music department gets a generous budget next year … and to hell with Beethoven. The regents are right. Do you know why? Because every little town in California demands that its high school have a marching band … in military uniform … keeping step … drilling to John Philip Sousa. The citizens want this because they love the military … they love parades. And if this university can’t provide music
graduates to build marching bands—by God, the small towns will look to some other university … and we’ll be in trouble. The regents aren’t dumb. They know what’s important.’

Joe had been so fascinated by this theory of martial music that he had accompanied his friend on an excursion to a small town to watch the marching band which had been trained by a recent graduate from the music department, and things were the way he had described, except that in addition to the band, they had a drill team consisting of little girls thirteen and fourteen dressed in military uniforms and carrying wooden replicas of army rifles, complete with leather slings. Led by an ex-army man in his fifties, the girls went through drills as if they were an infantry company on its way to the Civil War, and when at the end they lined up in one single rank and fired an imitation salute, a cannon went off and everyone cheered.

Wherever Joe looked in his society he found new proof of America’s fascination with violence. If he went into town he passed a dismal hall whose weather-beaten clapboard sides carried the sign:
Learn Karate! Destroy Your Assailant!
A crudely drawn picture showed a fearless young man breaking the neck of a colored man who leaped at him from behind a corner. Some years ago the hall had carried a simpler sign:
Learn Judo. Protect Yourself.
But this had attracted few customers, for it was self-defense. With karate you could kill the other man, and this possibility was so enticing that enrollments quadrupled.

On television it was professional football with its planned mayhem that attracted spectators who used to watch baseball, and in the movies it was constant violence, showing dozens dead where one would have made the point. But most of all there was Vietnam, that running sore which contaminated so much. ‘We want peace in Vietnam,’ Joe reflected as he looked at the letter which had so aroused him, ‘but God help Richard Nixon if he tries to do anything about it when he becomes President.’ He threw the letter on his table, and its postmark taunted him:
Pray for Peace.

And so the lonely debate progressed. Late that afternoon he made up his mind. Taking a sheet of college stationery, he sat at his desk for two hours, composing a careful letter which he spent another hour editing and rewriting. He then walked past the karate hall and into the
empty town; at the post office he registered the letter and had it stamped
Pray for Peace.
He placed the receipt carefully in his wallet. When he got back to his room he found Dr. Rubin, his chemistry professor, knocking on the door. ‘Come in,’ Joe said, and the frail little man sat primly on a straight-backed chair.

Placing Joe’s examination paper on the table, he said, in a complaining voice, ‘Joe, that was a miserable performance.’

‘I know. I’m dropping out.’

‘No need to,’ Rubin said in his nasal whine. He turned back the cover and disclosed the mark,
B
–. For some moments Joe looked at this unmerited grade, trying to decipher why Rubin had awarded it. Then, as if from an unreal distance, he heard Rubin saying, ‘I saw you at the peace rally. I saw the policeman club you on the head. I watched you during my exam and learned later that you didn’t even report for the others. But I will testify to the guidance people that you earned a
B
–, in my class and that you were too ill to take the later exams. Joe, without falsifying you can claim head damage … stay in the university …’

‘Not any more,’ Joe said. From his wallet he extracted the receipt for a letter he had mailed to his draft board and from his desk he produced his work sheets, and when Professor Rubin read them he grew respectful, for it was a letter that he might have written had he been a student:

There was more, some of it obviously the work of a man not yet twenty-one, all of it adding up to the picture of a human being reaching a moral decision and announcing himself as willing to abide by any consequences that might follow.

Rubin folded the letter, placed the receipt on top, and handed both back to Joe. ‘Things now become quite
different,’ he said. ‘The
B
– I’ve given you and the medical excuse I offer could become quite important when you get out of jail and want to gain readmission.’

‘You think it’ll mean jail?’ Joe asked.

‘Probably. What you’d better do, Joe, is talk with my wife. She an expert in this, you know.’

Rubin insisted that Joe accompany him, right then, to the big brick Presbyterian church in the center of town where the Women’s Committee for Draft Counseling had been given a narrow, draughty room for their work. At the beginning, church members had been appalled at the suggestion that their church sponsor such a committee, but in his quiet way their minister had insisted that Christians had a right to resist their government if their conscience warned them that the government was wrong. When the members continued their objections, he preached three sermons on the Nuremberg Trials, and concluded, ‘The burden of those trials was that conscience has an obligation. If our young people decide that they must exercise that conscience, we must help them do so in legal and constructive ways.’ He had refused to allow a vote. ‘This is not a matter for voting,’ he insisted. ‘This is a matter of human conscience. This is the logical extension of the Nuremberg Trials, and this church is going to discharge its duty.’ His argument was the more effective in that he himself had been an army chaplain at Guadalcanal.

When Professor Rubin led Joe into the church basement, they found at a messy table a small, wiry woman of forty with a tightly combed look. Nodding brusquely to her husband, she launched a barrage of sentences, leaping nimbly from one subject to the next: ‘I’m glad to see you’re not a deserter. I suppose you turned in your draft card and you want to know whether to go to jail or run away to Canada. How do I know this? Elementary, my dear Jackson.’ She laughed nervously at her little joke, then proceeded: ‘In this business we learn to spot deserters three blocks away. The military haircut, the shuffle, the fugitive slink. Your long hair makes you ineligible. As to the draft card, Laurence never brings me anyone who has burned his draft card, because that’s a legal problem. But it’s got to be something serious, or he wouldn’t bother on the day before New Year’s.
Voilà!
’

She smiled, not generously, but with the tight lips of a
self-conscious college girl who had not entirely matured. Professor Rubin made a brief introduction and left, whereupon she said, ‘Young man, we start with the fact that you find yourself in a position that is totally insane. If we do that, the alternatives become a little clearer. The government’s position is contradictory, immoral, illegal and, in my opinion, unconstitutional, in that no war has been declared. This means there is no legal base for the actions they will take against you. On the other hand, by turning in your draft card and rejecting the system, you’ve struck at the heart of a cooperative democracy and you must be punished. Our job is to work out precisely where you stand.

‘You can do one of three things. On the second of January you can report to your draft board, ask them to ignore your letter and request reinstatement. This will be granted quickly, because no one wants trouble. In your case, we can certify mental disturbance after having been unlawfully struck on the head. All this I can easily arrange, and I am legally obligated to recommend it.’

When Joe shook his head negatively, she continued: ‘Rejecting that, you automatically revert to 1-A status and are stigmatized as legally delinquent. You can be arrested on sight, but until someone presses the issue, you probably won’t be, so now you face two options. You can leave the university and try to hide out within the United States. There’s an effective underground which will do what it can to help. It operates in all cities … finds jobs for men like you … gets you clothes … gives you food. You would be astonished at the good men and women who are willing to hide you and provide some kind of living for you. But it isn’t easy, because the good firms insist upon seeing your draft card, which means that when you’re delinquent you can’t safely apply for anything but underground work.

‘Your third option is to leave the country … become a political refugee. But before you jump at this, I am obligated to warn you that even if you go so far as to become a citizen of another country, on the day you set foot back in the United States, you’ll be arrested and you’ll face a penitentiary term. And don’t rely on hopes of a general amnesty, either, because America is very revengeful and doesn’t go in for amnesty. At the end of World War II President Truman initiated the first amnesty board in our history. It reviewed over one hundred thousand
cases of draft-dodging and deserting, and in the end it granted amnesty to five thousand. You must face the fact that ultimately you will go to jail.’

Joe took a deep breath and said firmly, ‘I can’t take back my draft card.’

Mrs. Rubin nodded approvingly. She was always pleased when a young man said ‘I can’t’ rather than ‘I won’t,’ because the former indicated a moral conviction that could not be set aside, whereas the latter implied mere personal preference without a solid footing. The I-won’t boys got into trouble; the I-can’t, into jail.

The atmosphere in the narrow room was tense, and Mrs. Rubin broke it by saying, ‘If you do change your mind and take your draft card back, we can still offer you several attractive ways to beat the system. Lots of girls would be willing to marry you … have a baby real quick. Or we can find a minister who will coach you in how to be a conscientious objector. You’re not an atheist, are you? Or we have several doctors who will certify psychological disturbances. With that knock on the head we might even manage a straight medical certificate. Or you could confess to gross immorality.’

‘Not interested,’ Joe said.

At this point Mrs. Rubin began laughing, shyly but with an underlying sense of delight. ‘That leaves only one escape. But it’s a dilly. I like it because it highlights the insanity in which we find ourselves. If you’re really determined to beat the draft, the simple solution is to assemble two like-minded friends and enter into a conspiracy to shoot a bald eagle.’

‘What?’ Joe gasped.

‘Any young man who commits a felony as opposed to a misdemeanor is ineligible to serve in our armed forces. Since murder is a felony, if you commit murder you beat the draft, but this is rather a stiff price to pay for temporary freedom, because you might hang. There are lots of other felonies you wouldn’t want to bother with, like treason. The simplest felony on the books is shooting a bald eagle. But who knows where to find a bald eagle? So what you do is to enter into a conspiracy to shoot one, and then you don’t even have to bother with finding the damned thing.’

Joe was not a man who laughed much, but the concept of his sneaking into a darkened hallway, knocking three
times on a closed door and whispering, ‘Let’s go for that eagle, gang,’ was so appropriate to these times, that he chuckled, and in this more relaxed ambience Mrs. Rubin said, ‘So we face up to the fact that you’ve chosen a difficult course. It would be easier if you could count on some financial aid from your parents. Your father?’

‘A born loser.’

‘Your mother?’

‘She collects Green Stamps.’

He volunteered no more, so Mrs. Rubin dropped the subject. ‘In principle what do you propose doing?’ she asked.