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31 August 1971

Hearing in Wonderland

Edward Poser, Esquire, had advised me to waive my hearing, telling me it would only delay my request for discharge as a conscientious objector. But since this was the same guy who bungled my case in federal court and left me with seventy-two hours to pack up my life at Norton and ship out for Southeast Asia, I decided to see if ignoring his advice wouldn’t work better. The catch was that Air Force Regulation 35-24 was full of booby traps that made it easy for the Air Force to keep its troops around for their full enlistment—unless the Air Force decided to get rid of them. Unlike a civilian applying for CO status, I had to prove my beliefs “crystallized” in a specific period after I had joined the military but that they had roots in my civilian life. The other trap facing all conscientious objectors was having to prove you were opposed to all wars. That was where I felt uncomfortable. Playing by their rules, I couldn’t admit I was glad Lincoln ended slavery or that the Allies brought down fascism.

It didn’t matter. I wanted out, period. It started with the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre. The invasion of Cambodia and the killing of American college students while I was on active duty had “crystallized” it for me. When I first enlisted I thought I could ride out the war in silence, but the war kept butting in. I may have been keeping my head down and my mouth shut at Ubon, but the devastation I saw every day in the editing room at ComDoc only deepened my aversion and reminded me how aerial warfare throughout the twentieth century had either strengthened an enemy’s will to resist or led to nuclear annihilation. The crash of the Spectre gunship showed me how powerful the desire for revenge could be and how easily two avenging armies could fight a war without end. I had come to see the Vietnam War—and by extension, all war—as futile. The time had come for me when the end—getting out—justified the means, and if I had to contort the truth, so be it.

The hearing room was typical Air Force: new, clean, modern and sterile, capable of being packed up and shipped to the next war faster than I had packed for Thailand. Colonel Della Rippa, Harley’s commander at the 16th Special Operations Squadron, was the lead hearing officer. It didn’t take me long to discover why they called him “Grouchy Bear.” He had the sandpaper voice and leathery skin of someone who smoked too much and drank his whiskey neat and would rather be out fighting a war than sitting at a long table in a meeting room with wall-to-wall carpet discoursing on philosophy. Oh yes, that was another complication. Halfway through college I had lost my faith in Catholicism and was using existentialism as the basis of my claim. An awful lot of the officers I bumped into in the Air Force spoke in the cadence of war-loving, hellfire-and-brimstone TV evangelists, and I suspected a few eye-for-an-eye Baptists would be ruling on my case before all the dust settled.

Colonel Della Rippa, two junior administrative officers and Chief Master Sergeant Sturbutzel from CBPO sat at the far end of the table. I felt a little lonely down at my end. After running through the rudimentary facts of my application, I watched the colonel squint painfully at the seventy-some pages of documentation I had submitted. A lot of it was letters of support from old friends, teachers and professors and one awfully milquetoasty missive from my old priest, Father Boyle, who probably didn’t care much for the existential approach I was now taking, the result of four semesters of French filled with way too much Sartre and Camus and enough Hemingway, Salinger and Wilfred Owen in my English lit classes to make the French writers plausible.

“Aren’t you concerned about what will happen if Communism takes over the Free World?” asked Della Rippa.

I sat up confidently. This seemed too easy. “By the Free World, sir, do you mean places like Thailand?”

“That’s right,” said the colonel.

“And we should defend the Free World at all cost, sir?”

“That’s right.”

“And is Thailand a kingdom, a constitutional monarchy, a democratic republic, a military dictatorship, or some sort of a medieval theocracy?”

Della Rippa’s neck seemed to swell up and his leathery skin turned a little red. “I don’t pretend to be a politician, Airman Leary. I don’t know much more than it’s an American ally, but that’s plenty good in my book.” He cleared his throat and regathered his thoughts before glaring back at me. “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is your hearing, Airman, not mine and certainly not the American government’s.”

“Do you think it’s okay for American kids to kill and be killed defending a government we don’t know a thing about?” I was surprised to find I was enjoying this.

“Airman Leary, I won’t remind you again—I’m supposed to be asking the questions here.”

“I would just like it on the record that like many of you here, I used to think that war was a necessary evil, an ugly fact of the human condition. We were trained since elementary school to believe that every American war was justified and divinely blessed. But I had trouble for a long time fitting this with the Old Testament commandment not to kill and Christian teachings to forgive and love our neighbors. My thinking was still confused and muddled, however. Some wars in the past did seem to be justified, but my college ROTC class in modern warfare taught only about nuclear war and wars of counterinsurgency. Wars of counterinsurgency are offensive wars, and you’ve got a 50% chance of picking the wrong side.

“As far as a nuclear war is concerned, we had a young Japanese girl living with us when I was a kid who had survived Hiroshima and was getting her face rebuilt at Mass General. They did reconstructive surgery on her for a year and still she would never marry. Nuclear war to me is unthinkable, and yet there we were in class thinking about it. And I’m afraid there are respected American generals today who are thinking about it in Vietnam—without worrying about getting into World War III with China or the Soviet Union.

“Vietnam is supposed to be a limited, conventional war, and yet from my perspective here at Ubon editing raw gun-camera footage, the war has been devastating, especially for rural civilians. All I have seen is escalating levels of violence on both sides—war producing more war with no end in sight.

“I’ve spent many nights in the base library reading about the tragic history of the French in Indochina. I’ve been trying to make sense out of Asian culture and history and where we fit into it other than as barbarians. I can only conclude that war as the United States fights it is an unnecessary evil.”

The captain whispered something in Grouchy Bear’s ear.

“Was fighting Hitler unnecessary? Who else was going to close down the concentration camps?”

There it was, one of the sticky wickets that Edward Poser, Esquire, feared would trap me. Suddenly, my counsel’s strategy seemed brilliant, whereas I had simply hoped they wouldn’t ask about Hitler. “That was a different war, sir, the one that gave us the atomic bomb. The stakes are too high now. The chance someone pushes the button by mistake is too great.”

The pasty-pale lieutenant had the look of someone who had successfully carried out his plan to spend his entire tour hiding out in a windowless cubicle. “If Abraham Lincoln hadn’t ended slavery,” he asked stiffly, “would white and black musicians be playing together in that soul band of yours?”

“With all respect, sir, it’s been a hundred years since Lincoln was around. Slavery has ended everywhere on the planet and it didn’t take General Sherman scorching the earth to do it.”

Sturbutzel was perplexed. “Let me get this straight. Did I understand you to say you think rock ’n’ roll music is a good thing?”

Colonel Della Rippa rumbled through his thick stack of papers. “What does this letter from your old priest mean? ‘While I don’t concur with Brendan’s devotion to existentialism, I know him to be a young man who other than coming to a few CYO dances drunk and being a little girl-crazy, was generally of good character.’ Is Father Boyle saying you don’t believe in God?”

My heart sank. I knew I was dealing with a man who’d never read my full application. The kind that Edward Poser, Esquire, had warned me about with his little joke about how it would be good practice for dealing with Hollywood production executives who never read a script. “The regulations don’t require that I hold a conventional belief in an established religion as long as my beliefs are deeply held and fixed,” I replied.

I was starting to see how lifers like Della Rippa and Sturbutzel didn’t get upset when they disagreed with some low-level pipsqueak, they just turned into human bulldozers. Della Rippa pressed on. “How can you be sure that war is wrong and not believe in God?”

“Because that is the same thing concluded by existential philosophy—that we are alone in the universe and our only hope is in acting out of human compassion.”

Grouchy Bear Della Rippa’s attention span had screeched to a halt. It was time to get back to the war. “Let me get this straight. You don’t believe in God?”

“I’ve lost my faith somewhere along the line, sir.”

Sturbutzel looked over at the colonel sympathetically. Colonel Della Rippa stretched his neck, which seemed to be choking from an imaginary tie. “And you’re requesting discharge from the United States Air Force based on the teachings of a couple of French philosophers?”

My own imaginary tie seemed to be getting a little tighter. “That would be correct, sir.”

“That will be all, Airman Leary.”

I stood up and gave the snappiest salute I could muster for someone who was supposed to be a pacifist. Della Rippa gave back one of those swatting-fly-type dismissive salutes that did not fill me with confidence. Just as I was turning to leave he pretended to remember something that had nearly slipped his mind. “Oh, Airman Leary,” he said, clearing his throat, “There’s one last question I almost forgot.” I felt a trap closing in on me as he paused—dramatically, I noticed—before asking, “What would you do if you saw a couple of thugs beating your mother?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

He had me, he thought, squinting at me and giving me a crusty smile.

“But I know I wouldn’t call in a B-52 strike.”

The pasty-faced lieutenant snorted, trying to suppress a laugh.

“Will that be all, sir?” My salute was a little sharper this time, and I left feeling that I had held my own, but in the world of the Little Pentagon, holding your own wasn’t enough. Before I got out the door I felt pretty hopeless.

By nightfall the hopelessness turned to despair. Perez and Shahbazian stopped by the hootch to offer their condolences about my discharge petition being shot down. “It hasn’t been shot down yet,” I protested.

“The word around CBPO wasn’t good,” said Perez.

With near-incontrovertible logic, they urged me to come downtown for a massage at Niko’s, a Turkish bathhouse they had recently discovered. “Face it, Leary, you’re gonna be stuck around here for seven more months,” said Shahbazian. “You might as well make the best of it.”

Despite the soundness of their logic, I controverted them anyway and walked over to the library to write some letters. Danielle had sent along a clipping from the L.A. Times reporting how happy General Abrams had been with the Army’s new drug eradication program in the Mekong Delta region. I wrote back that Abrams might not be so chipper if he visited Thailand. I tried to think of a funny way to describe my CO hearing but finally gave up and told her simply that I wasn’t feeling too hopeful about getting home early. At least we would finally know one way or the other. I tried to write to my parents but quickly got stuck. I kept hearing my father’s voice asking, “What’s your problem?” And the answer was that I was lost. I was disgusted with the devastation of Southeast Asia that I witnessed every day and which seemed to be accomplishing nothing. But as much as I wanted nothing more to do with Nixon and Kissinger’s war, I was haunted by Della Rippa’s last question. In my heart of hearts I didn’t know what I would do if I saw my mother, or any old woman, being mugged. I couldn’t honestly tell myself whether I believed in non-violence, or minimum necessary force, or if I was just a coward.