A Conscientious Objector’s view of the War against Vietnam

Thomas Gilbert, Quaker, mystic and educator working in the field of literacy

by Thomas Gilbert

First things first: I was never in Vietnam. I was a conscientious objector (CO). When I turned 18, just after graduating from high school, I received a letter from the draft board indicating that I had been given a draft status of 1-A. There were only three classifications: 1-A (combatant), 1-A-O (non-combatant in military service, such as a medic), and 1-O (non-combatant conscientious objector), which meant I was to be inducted into the army. Of course, there were ways to defer military service, to put it off.

Too many young people were completely unaware that this was the critical juncture in their future draft status. Most wrote back that they were still going to school and needed a school deferment or were planning to attend college and therefore needed a school deferment.

This was a trick! I stated—the correct procedure—that I would not be looking for a deferment but would be asking for a 1-O classification as a Conscientious Objector. I then received a letter from the draft board stating that because I was in school and going to college, I would be given a school deferment.

However, when I stopped going to college, the draft board contacted me again and told me that my school deferment had ended. I was now reclassified as 1-A and would have to report for duty. Upon receiving the draft board’s letter, I sent copies of my first response from when I turned 18. I asked to be classified as a conscientious objector, as I was a Quaker.

This began a lengthy process of essay writing: I had to explain everything, including giving them an account of my Quaker family history. My parents and friends had to write letters of support and endorsement. It was also necessary to write letters confirming my aversion to guns, military exercises, and killing under all circumstances. I had to argue against the death penalty, discuss religious community events, and prove my participation in them.

There were six months of back-and-forth communication, which eventually ended in an interview by a military panel at the local draft board. The objective was to intimidate me and try to persuade me that I was not really a CO. I won the argument because I had written that initial letter at the age of 18. Those who did not ask for a 1-O classification at 18 were told sharply:

‘If you really were a conscientious objector, you would have stated that right from the start rather than simply asking for a school deferment. It’s too late for you to try to convince us now that you really are a conscientious objector when you didn’t state that at the beginning.’

This is why so many who tried to convince the draft board they were opposed to killing Vietnamese in faraway Vietnam were summarily denied late requests. They had to flee to Canada or Sweden, go to jail, or submit to being enlisted.

Instead of shooting, bombing, and napalming the Vietnamese, or fighting in wet jungle foxholes, or participating in the murder of civilians in places like My Lai, I became an orderly at Wooster Community Hospital for two years. The pay was $1.86 an hour. I worked 40 hours a week cleaning floors, giving baths to sick people, doing catheterizations, setting up traction, escorting people to therapies, assisting physically in surgeries, lifting, transferring, feeding, answering bell calls, changing dressings, taking vital signs, and doing whatever was asked of me.

It was crazy at times, but it was also rewarding. I had to write up daily reports. I met a lot of ordinary people who were not ordinary at all. They were people struggling to stay afloat and support the ones they loved. Working stateside in a hospital in Wooster, Ohio, as an orderly for two years was my way to complete my alternative service for the draft as a CO. I was listed as 1-O, officially a non-combatant, from September 1970 to September 1972.

Like all the young people of my generation, the Vietnam War opened my eyes. We were compelled to try to understand what was behind this war as a matter of urgency. I reflected long and hard on the war in Vietnam and came to my conclusions. It was not a war for democracy, peace, and justice at all.

The mess began a long time ago. The French colonized and brutalized Vietnam for more than a century, right up to World War II, when the Japanese took over and threw the French out, replacing one form of domination with another. During WWII, a Vietnamese patriot named Ho Chi Minh came to the USA. After asking for permission, he was subsequently invited. When he arrived, he went to Washington, D.C., where he met with Truman and offered the services of his underground rebel forces to assist with the American effort to expel the Japanese from Vietnam.

He also offered help with anything else Truman considered necessary to end the war and bring peace to the region. However, his offer had one respectful condition: if the U.S. and allied forces were successful, once the war was over, would the U.S. please help Vietnam become a free, independent nation? Would the USA protect Vietnam against outside colonial oppression? The U.S. agreed to Ho Chi Minh’s proposal, and a treaty was established between the USA and Vietnam while Ho Chi Minh was still on American soil.

Ho Chi Minh was a true scholar. He spoke nine different languages. While in the USA, he visited Philadelphia, where he came across our Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and Constitution. He spent time translating these documents into Vietnamese and brought them back to his country. He returned to Vietnam to organize his guerrilla rebels and assisted in the war effort as he had promised.

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When the war was over, Ho Chi Minh was such a great admirer of U.S. democracy that he conducted a radio broadcast for all of Vietnam from Hanoi, where he read the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution. Ho Chi Minh told his national audience that their new independent country would be based on these three documents. The applause and cheering from the Vietnamese people, it is said, lasted over twenty minutes.

After the war, Ho Chi Minh faced the terrible reality of U.S. foreign policy. When he formally asked the U.S. government to honor the treaty, the Dulles brothers at the Central Intelligence Agency stepped in. They advised Truman against supporting Ho Chi Minh and against supporting Vietnamese independence. The Dulles brothers proposed giving Vietnam back to the French as the only “reasonable” and “diplomatic” arrangement to maintain the economic and political balance in the region. Ho Chi Minh was utterly astounded by this betrayal. Nevertheless, he was determined to secure his country’s freedom and liberation by any means necessary.

An interjection

While the USA was fighting for independence in the 1700s, we enlisted the help of every nation willing to assist us, including those hostile to the British Crown: the French, the Hessians, and Native Americans. We did not care who helped us in our fight for independence. We weren’t concerned about the feelings of the British. Ho Chi Minh was like a Vietnamese George Washington—though, unlike Washington, Ho Chi Minh did not own slaves.

When Ho Chi Minh realized the extent of the allied betrayal, he sought any assistance available—and what was available to him was communist China and the Soviet Union. At that point, he didn’t care. Independence for Vietnam was his sole aim.

Over the next two decades, Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese Liberation Army (NVLA)—with Russian and Chinese assistance—began making headway against the French, who had been allowed to return and rule Vietnam by the allies after WWII. The French asked the USA to join the war against the Vietnamese anti-colonial movement. Slowly, the Vietnamese nationalists and the USA became embroiled in a military conflict.

Our underlying reasons for entering the war were strategic but mainly economic. Texas oil billionaires wanted drilling rights off Vietnam’s coast, where oil deposits had already been discovered… and they got them. U.S. mining corporations wanted the aluminum deposits in Vietnam’s soil. It was no coincidence that Agent Orange was used extensively on jungles—partly to clear land for U.S. mining companies after the “inevitable” U.S. victory. In the process of defoliating Vietnam, many children of that generation were born with birth defects.

The Vietnamese eventually won the war. First, U.S. ground forces were forced out because the American public would no longer tolerate their children’s deaths. Then, the U.S. resorted to bombing Vietnam from the stratosphere to avoid being shot down. It is said the U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam than in all of WWII. Still, the enormous violence inflicted wasn’t enough to defeat the Vietnamese nationalists. The cowardly bombing didn’t work.

Finally, the North Vietnamese Liberation Army, founded by Ho Chi Minh, defeated the U.S. puppet regime in the South. The South Vietnamese regime’s U.S. advisors and collaborators had to flee. Two million Vietnamese died before Vietnam achieved independence.

A sideline comment:

John D. Rockefeller’s munitions company, Rockwell International, made most of the American army’s rifles. I remember evening news reports during the war where correspondents investigated black market routes of military gear traveling illicitly from South Vietnam to North Vietnam. It was well known that American soldiers were being killed with American weaponry. North Vietnamese military installations had U.S. weapons made by Rockwell International. Some were captured from U.S. forces, but not all. The search for this underground supply route found nothing.

Now for the details: allegedly, Rockwell International exploited loopholes in maritime and border laws to increase sales by selling to both sides. It is said they disassembled guns, listed them as machine parts, and sold them to Russia. The weapons were then shipped to China and into North Vietnam for reassembly. The military-industrial complex made fortunes from war and was unscrupulous. They wanted the war to continue. Purportedly, Rockefeller’s company sold weapons to both sides, making millions. The reprehensible Rockefeller was almost unanimously elected as Gerald Ford’s Vice President.

Those of us who lived through those times, who experienced or participated in the war—or who determinedly stayed out of it—have had to come to terms with it. We know that much of what is now taught in some institutions about the Vietnam War is absolute bullshit.

Time has passed. I’ve worked in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities for 52 years, and I’ve found no intervention as powerful and necessary for this population as literacy acquisition. Being able to read and understand the world and history is vital in the USA, where illiteracy rates are high. Literacy might also help people decide to conscientiously object to participating in further unjust wars.

*I got a great deal of this analysis from a visiting lecturer at the college of Wooster, which I attended from 1969-1973. He was an iconoclastic historian, connected with one of the universities in Southern California. Sadly, I cannot recall his name.

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Thomas Gilbert has spent the better part of the last 55 years in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities. Over the last 30 years he has produced a program for teaching full literacy skills to those within this population with Aspergers, autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, dyslexia, traumatic brain injury, ADD and ADHD.

He has tutored over 50 individuals from northern Ohio long term, one-on-one, in one-hour weekly sessions in a cooperative learning style, taking many people from the level of beginning emergent literacy skills to independent reading. He has logged more than 10,000 hours tutoring in the process.

Thomas’s web site on literacy acquisition is www.literacyforanyone.com It is 100% free to use and share and download. Thomas also dabbles in writing poetry, short stories and novels He has composed simple musical compositions for piano. Thomas also has a deep curiosity about metaphysics and mysticism.