Iraq & Vietnam War Stories

Frank is a psychotherapist residing in Northampton, MA. He has a 21 year-old son who is presently in college on Staten Island, NY. Recently Frank joined several other townspeople in arranging for a special counting machine to be placed in the window of a local business that would track the various dead and wounded in the War in Iraq – American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and civilians.

I grew up in Medford, MA. Where I was living it was a very roughneck suburb and in that period of time, the mid-‘60’s it was kind of surrounding me. There were many fights in school and just as many of them were female-to-female fights as male fights. It was always very confusing for me. I felt that if I was to have any affiliation with any one group I was going to have to show some kind of hostility to everyone else and I was very uncomfortable with that so I suppose I could have gone either way – towards a violent approach to relationships or to staying isolated. Instead I found a girlfriend and she became a kind of haven for me.

I did not want to go to college so I worked for General Electric. Little by little this Vietnam thing began to seep in. I was not attuned to the news and in many ways my high school experience had not been touched by the war since those around me were too busy fighting their own local wars against one another. At GE though, I was now surrounded by those in vehement opposition to the growing anti-war movement. After all we were working in a place that was surviving on the war. You know, not that General Electric needed the Vietnam War to survive, but it really profited from it. Regularly I’d be hearing, “We need to kill the bastards, we need to just drop atomic bombs on those darn demonstrators!” Listening to all this stuff I’d be thinking, “Hey, they’re talking about part of a peer group that I am no longer part of.” I guess in a way it aroused my interest in that peer group. I began to wonder why they were attacking my peer group and I didn’t really know what my peers were saying.

So there I was having these experiences and these thoughts and in the meantime I was racing cars and dealing with my girlfriend and then along came pot. I started to reconnect with some of my friends, at night during the week. My old friends from high school and the neighborhood were smoking pot just about every night. So I sort of joined in to some extent. What we would do is go to my friend Paul’s house. He lived in his brother’s basement that by day didn’t look like anything in particular, but by night as soon as you turned the black light on was transformed into a hippy haven. I was really into music at the time. So we’d joke around for a while and then settle down to listen to music. I think it was through the music that I was able to get a little space from the adult male crowd that I depended on in my work circumstance. The music was really the way that things opened up for me. What I really did was listen to the words to these songs. It soon became clear to me that the road to hell or to enlightenment, however you want to think of it, was the words. First of all, there were the Beatles and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and then Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Dylan. My God, Dylan was really like taking a hallucinogenic drug all by itself. And then we started to go to Harvard Square where some of these performers would show up and that became a vehicle for a kind of dawning of consciousness, which I have to say in retrospect happened really quickly.

The other thing that was going on was that I started to think that this way of work was not going to be my way of life. It just couldn’t be, I couldn’t bear it. I had two uncles who were white-collar workers there and there was a lot of expectation that I would follow this newly solidifying family tradition. I began to let my two uncles know how disillusioned I was becoming and they’d really struggle to work that out, saying “At least just finish the apprenticeship.” Yet, I had this friend in the work environment, another young guy, Jerry, say that he too was becoming disillusioned and he took vocational aptitude and interest testing at Boston University. It sounded encouraging to me so I signed up for it. At that time, B.U.’s vocational counseling was really substantial. I had to take a week off, so I took my week of vacation and went in every single day and for the first time learned what a bagel was. I took these tests and I had to wait some period of time before the results, several weeks or months. Meanwhile, stuck like I was at GE, my self-esteem was plummeting on a daily basis. It was just amazing how I would lie awake fantasizing over what freeing things I would discover when the test results came in. I’m almost joking and its kind of like Rodney Dangerfield stuff, but I really thought I was going to be totally lucky. I fantasized that if they discovered who I really was, they’d solve my problem by kicking me right out of GE! That’s really what I was thinking.
Finally the day came for me to go in and get the results. So one morning, I’m sitting in this guy’s tiny dark office, and he starts telling me that my test results indicated my interests lay in fields like psychology ! At some point I had to say, “Can you start over again, this doesn’t sound like it relates to me. I don’t recall that section. I must have been imagining things when I answered.” I don’t have to tell you that I was thinking, “You can’t be talking to me.” I mean, this was really bizarre! He assured me the results were real, and ended up suggesting, “Why don’t you take a course or two at the college level, see what happens?” He was admitting and commiserating with me that the gap between what the testing indicated and what I was doing was horrendously large, and I should take some courses to see. I could feel my mind opening up to bigger things.

I decided to take a course, but the first thing I did was give my notice. I was going to end the apprenticeship program. I stayed employed for awhile on the night shift, though, while I figured out what I was going to do. So here I am, taking two summer school courses at Tufts University during the day and working 11-7 at night. In retrospect, this was very decisive, because now I was utterly cut off from my old, probably less-aspiring, friends and suddenly in with all these new people. My old friends came awake at night and raced cars on the weekend, but I had to be at work at night. This was a kind of launch into a whole new life. This was all happening in ’69, the summer of ’69.

Meanwhile, here’s what was happening with the draft. I was called up in late ’67. I went to the physical, and as I am remembering what happened, it feels like some sort of waking up story. At six o’clock in the morning two old ladies give me some tokens and I’m put on a bus of people my age. We’re all being corralled, really just herded to this examination center. Something about that just made me furious, but my feelings stayed deeply buried. I just couldn’t stand up and say what I wanted to say. I still remember so vividly wanting to stand in the front of the bus and say to everybody, “Look around! Two old ladies and some fat guy driving the bus are controlling us, and we can’t take matters into our own hands? Do you want to go fight in some war? Do you even want to be physically prodded and messed with? Let’s say, “Stop!” We can’t allow this to happen.” I could hear all this in my head, but I did not have the courage or the trust in my own sense of reality to say any of it out loud. I wanted to say, “We can not only disable this bus, but we can go in and destroy the draft center, just totally destroy it! Then there’ll be no records, there’ll be no nothing. They won’t even know our names. We can do that, we have enormous power in our hands, but we’re just being herded like cows to the slaughter!”

I proceeded through the whole rest of the frustrating day. I got angry just seeing that all the clocks in this physical examination center were set to different times. I wanted to grab the clocks and throw them, smash them. And, again, I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. There were only two things I could do. On the written stuff, I said I slept with my mother and that I urinated in the bed at night all the time. Then, when they asked, “Is there anything we don’t know about you?” I said in desperation, “Yes, I have a broken knee that I got in a skiing accident two years ago”. In fact I had been in a skiing accident, but the x-ray showed I had only twisted the knee.

I did everything I could. I blew this stuff out of the water as much as I could. My girlfriend, who was normally quite soft-spoken, was on my side. Even before I went on the bus that morning she was saying things like, “ Resist, Frank. Don’t do what they want.”

A period of time went by before I was called for a re-examination. By this time, my anger was turning into action. My girlfriend was decisive in this, because she got me hooked up with her minister. After he and I talked for a while, he suggested, “If you want to do something to educate people, I have this room in the church house you can use with my blessing.” So two things started to come together. One was the beginning of a support network, and the other involved going back to my family physician, who’d overseen the death of my grandfather. I explained my situation to him and he said to come back the following week. I went back a week later and, handing me an x-ray, he said, “Use this.” I went to my reexamination and they asked, “Do you have any further information to add concerning your broken knee?” I said, “Here’s the x-ray.”

Soon after I received a card in the mail, telling me I was now classified 1-Y because of my injury. I remember how I felt when I got classified this way. I didn’t feel that I was participating in a crime. Not at all. I felt like I was refusing to participate in a crime. I was scared silly. I felt the same feeling I have now about the war in Iraq: rage. At the time all my strong feelings were being channeled and fed by the draft, leading me to draft resistance.

As for good Dr. Glocnick, he was an older man in his ‘60s at a minimum, when he gave me the x-ray. He had become close to my family during the time of the death of my grandfather, and I think that he felt horribly helpless to heal my grandfather. It could be that it was a compassionate gesture along those lines to compensate my family and me for not being able to assist him. I never again heard from or saw him. Then a strange thing happened. Not long after I got the x-ray and the deferment I fell very sick and ended up in the hospital with something similar to mononucleosis. The whole thing happened in the same office that Dr. Glocnick occupied when he gave me the x-ray. Perhaps someone was working there simultaneously with Glocnick or was Glocnick gone?

So the Y-1 got me out, but my whole psyche had been affected by this experience with being drafted and going to my physical. I decided I had to get involved and began working at a draft resistance center. There were three other guys and me, with the minister in the background. With the help of the American Friends Service Committee, we started to get educated. These guys would come at night and lecture us on a whole range of things to implement straight-ahead resistance: conscientious objector status, emigration, hardship status, and how to get medical disability.

Somehow, given these strange twists of fate, I was becoming a draft counselor. It wasn’t because I had an informed political position. I didn’t really even know what Vietnam was. I didn’t know why we were there. I didn’t know why communism was bad or democracy was good. I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t care. I didn’t study it. I didn’t want to know anything about it. I was not interested in it. What I did know was that many people were being taken from their lives against their will. They were being sent into battle and they were being killed and at this point even some of my friends were coming back dead. The whole thing just kept feeding an outrage at this visceral, direct level. There was nothing intellectual about it. I had friends who were saying, “I’m going to war and that’s great.” A guy named Kevin went to the Marines. Ray and Dennis went to the Army. I would try to push them, but we just couldn’t talk. I would ask them, “Why would you want to do that?” “To kill Gooks,” they’d respond with all this empty bravado: they were no more politically oriented or geographically knowledgeable than I was. No, it was some kind of machismo thing they were salivating over. That only struck me as stupid and ignorant. I feel exactly the same way now as I did then, and want to scream: “Don’t you know that guns kill? What do you think you’re playing?”

There’s this woman in the Moore film, “Fahrenheit 9/11”, who sends her kid to war and then is shocked when he dies. I can’t understand this. And then she comes out the other side saying the government took her son? No. Wrong. The government didn’t take her son. Of course, they took him, they’re happy to put him up as a target, but she gave son. Can anyone ever come to grips with that? She gave her son.

So, I was trying to talk to people, to help them see all this. We were setting up draft meetings, not just waiting for people to come to us. We were trying to go out and get people to not go in any way, to not do this! The more my own friends came back paraplegic or killed, the more clear the need for resisting the war became to me. Such unnecessary death was so hard to watch. These guys and I had smoked together and listened to music. We hung around and got big guys to buy beer for us and commiserated over hurts. We talked of the future. We complained about each other’s parents, our own parents. We really felt that we understood each other as no one else understood us.

I remember my friend, Jimmy and his desolation. He was paralyzed from the waist down. He was in a wheelchair and on so many drugs he often could hardly recognize us. Then, when his senses cleared, he killed himself. I can’t begin to tell you the rage that I felt and still feel over the loss of Jimmy and all the others. Not just now because we’re talking about it. I feel it these days a lot. I go to the websites of the Iraq War casualties and look at the body counts on a daily basis. It’s just dominating my thoughts all the time.

I have not yet gone to the The Wall in Washington, but I’m going to at some point I know. My son, Phillip, and I went to Washington, walked around, and did everything, everything but that. I wasn’t ready. I did go to Vietnam though, somewhat fortuitously but very determinedly nonetheless, because my wife Carolyn’s brother was an engineer for a company working in Vietnam in the late ‘60’s. So he was there, really literally walking in the park, when the first fighting broke out. He heard the pop and snap of bones and the whole thing. His company was doing supplemental engineering projects, transportation and communication systems for the military. Now he lives in Singapore. After Carolyn and I got married some twenty years ago, we went to Singapore to visit him and then about 10 years ago now, we all went to Vietnam together to where his company has offices. We drove around and went to all these different places.

I spent a lot of time standing by myself on the sidewalk trying to comprehend, trying to grasp. Occasionally, I would see, in the crowd in Saigon, a deranged American face flit through. There are people there who got lost and can’t find their way back. They were spirits almost. They were tangible ghosts of the whole fiasco. Our son, Philip, went back a third time and went to Hanoi as well as Saigon. He spent a lot of time absorbing the culture and when he returned he asked me, “Why were we at war? What was that about?”

And I can’t fathom it. Throughout Vietnam now, you will see an extraordinarily high number of women. Where are the men? You cannot forget that there was a war, and that will not be forgotten for a long time. I can’t say how many generations it is going to take. However, amazingly, there was no animosity towards us. People would be so kind. They’d come up and speak to us, those who could, and through my sister-in-law’s interpretation, we could speak to each other. They held no animosity towards us. I try to explain it to myself and the best I can do is that in the scenario we experienced, as is much the case now in Iraq, there was a kind of cultural pride that got caught up in massive government-based, abstract clashes of ideology. That cultural belongingness is a vehicle through which the larger ideological positions can take up the populace and then the government can say, “Here’s a gun. Here are some rations. Here’s a target. You’re shooting for your country, your identity, your culture.” It’s not really about fighting other human beings in this presentation. They never had human beings as the target. They had the defense of an ideology as the target.

Getting back to Vietnam in the ‘60’s…The lottery system took the wind out of our draft counseling sails. The middle population – the less strong, the less enraged, were willing to accept the crapshoot that was the lottery, especially since by 1970 and 1971 the tide was turning and fewer people were being drafted. The tide was turning in many ways, politically, militarily, economically, so the opposition to the draft and to the war dissipated.

I went to an event in Amherst (MA) three or four months ago. A man was talking about the potential reinstitution of the draft and so I went. Frances Crowe (local activist, draft counselor, AFSC chapter founding member and interview subject for this book) was there and a number of other people. At one point they asked for questions from the audience and I said, “Well look, what did we learn from the last time around that we can bring to this?” I came away from that meeting very disillusioned, because people, who I might otherwise admire, were leveling their sights more at how to help conscientious-objectors present their case to draft boards than to oppose any reinstatement of the draft. In doing a retrospective critique of what my fellow counselors and I did during Vietnam, I see that really we only helped the privileged few, the ones who, for whatever reason, were agreeable to our message. As draft counselors, we couldn’t help the ones that really needed to be helped, those who did not have the awareness and resources to prevent themselves from having to serve in a war that did not then, and does not now, feel just. That’s where I feel that only talking about draft counseling is just not doing enough.

A small group of us with draft age children are now talking about what to do if they should face a draft. We have been systematically searching for alternative places in the world to consider moving. With Bush “reelected,” this is a historical moment that does descend into the personal. In that context, we are thinking about what would it be like to move people to another country. This is a serious conversation among our ranks. There are four couples involved in the conversation, and we’ve been searching different places, talking about these places, and beginning to see what’s involved specifically in each location. If there’s a draft then I know that we will do that full force. As guilty as I will feel about the privilege of that, I will do it. I don’t know what else I would do. One of my friends asked me a series of very interesting questions. He said, “When did the Jews know they should go? When did they know, ‘we need to leave’? What signs were they taken by? What were they confused about? How did they leave?” I’m very ambivalent about our talk, but that’s where we are.

In the meantime, we are placing digital counters embedded in placards around the city. The first wave of counters will be saying, “Since March 2003, Northampton tax payers have contributed $47.5 million to the war in Iraq.” Nationally we’re very close to $446 billion as of right now, which I firmly believe is a low estimate. And that’s not real money. That’s money from the future. It doesn’t include the interest on that money. It doesn’t include all kinds of things. That’s where I’m concerned, where we’re all concerned now.

We’re also going to put up a wave of the digital counters to show Iraqi civilian deaths, which are already about four times as many deaths as in the World Trade Center Towers and all four planes. Four times as many. What did those people do to us? How are their deaths relevant? Why did we decide to kill four times the number of their civilians as some Saudi Arabians, not Iraqis, killed of our civilians? I don’t get the logic.

So, we’re going to do that and we’re going to put up counters that show American soldiers killed, which is now almost at 970. This is what we’re going to do in the meantime. It transcends the opposition to the draft. I think the opposition to the draft is important, but I think at this point it is a symptom of the problem.

There’s really only one more thing that occurs to me. My question—that I think needs to be discussed, that needs to be registered in people’s minds, that needs to be in the papers—is what do we do with this rage? I see it in every way now. I see it in the realization that none of Bush’s Cabinet has ever participated in war. They haven’t learned a single thing. I also see that no war has ever come that did not lead to the next war. I feel disconnected from society by virtue of this rage that can only be dealt with by answers to that question. I think that some pathway to learning is the only way that this rage will dissipate and will enable me to get reconnected with and believe in society. I don’t believe in society. I don’t believe in it. I see nationalist gestures, and I just can’t—it really has shot a hole right through the center of the whole fabric. What is the residue of this? What is the remainder of this, not only for the individual, but also as some of the subtle conscious psychological bedrock of one’s family and the next generation, and the generation after that. I want to say that its not just 970 Americans killed, its nine hundred and seventy American families proper whose lives have been torn asunder. Now, how many members of those families, how many relatives, how many neighbors, how many friends have had their lives affected? Multiply it and understand its reach and see where all of the rage comes from.

Our government is doing something that is unspeakable once again. I just cannot find the words for it, but thank you for letting me try.