Parents sometimes actively helped the FBI find their sons, or else sent vitriolic letters disowning them: “You have disgraced your family and your country. … We never want to hear from you again except to have the money back we lent you to fly back to your base. … We burned your birth certificate and your insurance policy. You are no longer a son of ours.”
Ed Sowders, a Vietnam veteran deserter who lived in the “poor people’s underground”for three years, recalled how “this community-based network of relatives, neighbors, and friends helped me remain in my own home, safe in the knowledge that they would inform me or my family of anything out of the ordinary. …” The network saved Sowders from certain arrest. Trapped in his house by FBI agents, he escaped amidst a specially choreographed pack of teen-agers with baseball bats and gloves, ostensibly heading for the neighborhood park.
A veteran recalled his anger at coming home to an antiwar demonstration: “I ran into a ‘Resist the Draft’ rally on the street. At first I smiled; kids at it again, just a fad. Then I started gettin’ sore. About how I had to go and they could stay out. My Negro buddy didn’t like the war, but he went in too. I just stood there and got sure at those spoiled rich kids tellin’ people to ‘resist the draft.’ What about us poor people? For every guy who resists the draft, one of us gotta go, and he gets sent out into the boonies to get his backside shot at. One of their signs said, ‘We’ve Already Given Enough.’ And I thought, ‘What have they given?’”
At the peak of the war, an America soldier went AWOL every two minutes. Another deserted every six minutes.
Jim Fallow, who starved himself until his weight fell below the underweight limit for the Army, recalls how he felt on failing his physical: “It was, initially, a generalized shame at having gotten away with my deception, but it came into sharper focus later in the day. Even as the last of the Cambridge contingent was … deliberately failing its color blindness tests, buses from the next board began to arrive. These bore the boys from Chelsea, thick, dark-haired young men, the white proles of Boston.
“Most of them were younger than us, since they had just left high school, and it had clearly never occurred to them that there might be a way around the draft. They walked through the examination lines like so many cattle off to slaughter.”
In 1971 a survey of men on their way to Vietnam found that 47 per cent thought the war was a mistake, and another 40 per cent thought America was not fighting hard enough to win. Both groups questioned the wisdom of what they were doing.
Colleges were the main sanctuary from the draft, and many teachers … did what they could to help their students. College grades were referred to as “A, B, C, D, and Nam,” and antiwar professors sometimes adjusted their grading policies accordingly. “It’s a rotten, stinking war,” said one, “and I’ll be damned if I’ll help it along by sending over more cannon fodder. Unless he’s clearly an idiot … I intend to pass every able-bodied man in my class.”
In the summer of 1968, Paul Milligan received an induction order from his Des Moines draft board. On the day he reported, no military transport was available to take him to Fort Polk for basic training, so he was given a job for the day filing case histories in the local draft office. He read about young men who had avoided the draft through one ruse or another. At first Milligan resented what others had done, but later he began to feel the fool. That night, he telephoned his mother: “The whole setup is corrupt. I don’t need to be here! I don’t need to be here! … I simply didn’t need to be drafted!”
Paul Milligan became one of the 2,150,000 draft-age men who went to Vietnam, and was one of the 51,000 of his generation who sacrificed their lives in the war.
There were dozens of ways to get an exemption by abusing one’s body. … The grandson of a Russian immigrant pushed his body to extreme limits by staying awake for over a week before taking his preinduction physical. He could have avoided the draft in easier ways, but he felt honor bound to use the same technique that his grandfather had used to avoid conscription in the Russian army.
An antiwar group called The Women Against Daddy Warbucks stole the “1” and the “A” from the typewriter of a New York [draft] board to keep it from reclassifying anyone 1-A.