2 Safe Return “In a large vintage office building off New York City’s Union Square, an area which has traditionally been the headquarters for groups involved in radical causes, there is a Dos Passosan office which is a chaos of newspapers, books, files and posters. On the door, a letterhead announcing the Citizens’ Commission on U.S. War Crimes is scotch taped to the glass.”
That’s how the writer James Reston, Jr. described the two room suite Tod Ensign and I occupied on the tenth floor at 156 Fifth Avenue on the uptown corner of West 20th Street. Reston’s geography, licenced for effect, was a few blocks off but the atmospherics were on target.1 This was New York City’s Movement building where many left wing groups had their headquarters in the late sixties and early seventies, including Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And it was here that, during the late fall of 1971, Tod and I brain stormed daily about what we might still accomplish politically to help keep the smoldering Vietnam War visible in the minds of an American public for whom the decade long conflict appeared to be over. In the interim the old CCI letterhead remained stuck to the door. Every morning I would walk to the office from my apartment on East 5th Street near First Avenue. Most days I’d follow the same route: across St. Marks Place and up Fourth Avenue toward Union Square, then along Broadway, crossing on 20th Street one short block west to Fifth Avenue. Living solo then I’d almost always breakfast out, often at the B&H Dairy on Second Avenue a few doors down from the Gem Spa, the all-night newsstand, an East Village landmark at the corner of St. Marks Place. The challah French toast at the B&H was worth the abuse from the owner/cashier, a congenital crank named Dave who didn’t have a good side anyone could ever get on, and who doubled as the restaurant’s principal short order cook, one of the great ones. I’m a four season soup fiend, day or night, so on occasion I’d breakfast on a bowl of vegetarian matzah ball soup - no chicken stock in a dairy restaurant - and a couple of slices of fresh puffy challah bread. Or I’d alter my route and stop at the Veselka, further up Second Avenue at E. 9th Street, for the Ukranian version of Jewish penicillin, veal and cabbage soup, or eggs with kielbasa. By the time I got to the elevator of our building I phenomenon carrying a coffee, ‘black no sugar,’ in one of those cardboard take-out cups used everywhere throughout the city, Mediterranean blue, stamped with scenes of classical Greece. Before Starbucks and boutique java, it was widely held that all the coffee shops in town - not to be confused with the coffeehouses of the Greenwich Village Beat scene where real espresso was sold - were owned by Greeks. Tod, being a night owl and late sleeper, I’d often have an hour or two alone to sip my coffee, brief the late edition of the Times and peruse the morning’s mail, to include many broadsides and calls for action from the far flung reaches of the Movement, a coast to coast phenomenon. I would track my mental score card of the Left, its players and competing lines, from such weeklies as the Militant, organ of the SWP - Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist), the (soon to be Maoist) Guardian, the New Left Liberation News, the incendiary Black Panther monthly - we were all under the sway of the Panthers then - and a host of others underground periodicals put out nationwide, some by GIs still on active duty. But Tod and I were also inveterate correspondents, virtually a lost art in the retrograde postmodern, today’s era of telegram-style electronic email. The carbon-set of every letter we composed went into a chronological - or ‘chron’- file, whereas virtually every scrap the postman delivered we stuffed into files labeled ‘incoming,’ forming a collection that today is housed at Cornell University in many boxes’2 The letters in those boxes document chronologically and in detail how, between October and December 1971, Tod and I engineered the new direction we were looking for. It was this meandering process that James Reston, Jr., in a book-length work appearing almost two years later, would compress into the arrival of a single letter from “a despairing... draft resister in Paris,” who wrote that ”the exile community there was dwindling, and one of the ‘old timers’ was about to pack his bags.. and return home.” Could CCI contact a lawyer, he inquired, “to help in his reentry?”3 Tod, of course, was a lawyer. But what would be the political angle for defending a returning exile, not the civilian draft resister whose letter Reston describes, but the “old timer” in question being an Army deserter who’d already served in Vietnam? It was precisely this conundrum Tod and I had toyed with all that fall of 1971. The most promising avenue pointed to the increasingly public discussion already underway about the fate of young men of conscience who had fled the country to avoid fighting in a war they opposed. Now, if Vietnam was truly winding down, under what circumstances could these men be allowed to return home? Among the liberal Protestant denominations, and for the small antiwar wing of the Democratic Party, the only viable solution would be to declare a general amnesty, especially after all the American prisoners of war had been returned by Hanoi, and all our troops brought home, neither of which condition would be fully met for another two years. When asked at a press conference in October 1971 about an amnesty President Richard Nixon had curtly responded with a single word, “No.” In the months ahead, whenever the subject was raised Nixon continued to voice strong opposition to amnesty, always dismissing the extent of the resistence to the draft while diminishing the size of the exile community it had spawned to “a few hundred cases.. who deserted their country in time of war.” In fact some estimates put the size of the exile community in the tens of thousands. And that was only those who’d fled before being drafted. What about the men who’d been in uniform and took French leave? Many of them also found asylum aboard, but it was believed that most were living underground in the United States. In 1971 alone the Pentagon figure for incidents of desertion - defined as absence from one’s unit for more than thirty days - was 98,324.4 Given CCI’s established orientation toward working with those who’d served in the military our contribution to the amnesty debate would emphasize, not the resisters of conscience, but the resisters in uniform. Over the course of the Vietnam War there would be over 500,000 incidents of desertion from the ranks of the U.S. armed forces, a figure far surpassing any previous American war. But did these acts constitute resistance to the war in Vietnam? “Yes,” Tod and I would argue for the next five years, the period during which the campaign for amnesty occupied a small corner of the nation’s body politic. It would be our contention that acts of desertion when framed by the immoral and, by now, widely unpopular wars in Indochina were objectively acts of resistance even when clouded by an inability on the part of those who deserted to articulate their actions in conventional political or pacifistic language. Furthermore we maintained that, for the purposes of amnesty, all these cases of desertion would have to be examined uniformly. Any attempt to sort out those among these vast numbers whose actions could be characterized as substantially political from those who were motivated by other factors - often a healthy rejection of racist or abusive military command authority - would be, not just futile, but unjust. Here we were confronting the befogged class-divide in U.S. society that had disproportionately shunted blue collar and minority Americans into military service and combat, while offering one sector of its masculine youth, overwhelmingly white and middle class, the education and social underpinning required to either avoid the draft though any number of avenues of exemption, or for that minority actually snared by conscription who would chose exile over service, the indispensable cultural trappings to arrive at and act upon abstract predicaments of conscience.5 We supported and honored all acts of resistance to the Vietnam War; but as a political priority we would focus on those resisters who were least likely to be championed in their long-shot bid for amnesty and repatriation without strings or penalties. Some time in late December we arrived at the name of the organization that would replace CCI and sustain our involvement in the battle for amnesty. We would call ourselves SAFE RETURN: Committee in Support of Self-Retired Veterans (Deserters). In another sense it was not so much the campaign to win a just amnesty for draft and military resisters that had stimulated - at its most exposed nerve - our organizational reorientation. The real dilemma confronting Tod and me, along with thousands of other antiwar activists, was how to initiate viable activities during the Vietnamization phase of the war that would prevent the American public from ignoring the harsh reality that the U.S. role in the violence still engulfing Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, was far from over. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops continued to occupy our bases in South Vietnam, and in December 1971 they were fighting and dying there every day. The peoples and land throughout Indochina were still being ravaged and raked by an obscene pounding of ordinance far outstripping all the destructive power unleashed during World War Two, including the two atomic bombs dropped over Japan - a statistical fact history would later record without dissent. When Tod and I created Safe Return we did so with an eye toward adapting an emerging public issue of relevance to a post- war political debate to an objective that remained our unwavering priority and deepest commitment, continued organized opposition to the invisible but on-going war. The series of letters commenting on the low mood of the Paris exile community came from Joe Heflin, a draft resister who was living there. Joe was affiliated with the International Quaker Center, an informal contact point for U.S. military deserters who were granted political asylum by the French government, because president Charles De Gaulle had sanctioned this affront to the Pentagon to flaunt his disdain for the American War. Tod had been in Paris that previous July after attending the second session of the International Enquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Oslo. He met Joe then and several of his closest comrades among the Paris-based deserters. We would solidify this contact with Joe Heflin through a steady exchange of letters in the months ahead, in the course of which we had begun to consider several scenarios for dramatizing the amnesty debate. Our approach with the war crimes issue had been to create forums where veterans could address the public in their own words about how their experiences with atrocities in Vietnam had turned them against the war. Now we would employ a similar technique for exiled deserters who would voluntarily return to the U.S., or who would surface from their domestic hiding places, as test cases for amnesty demanding complete exoneration for their legitimate acts of resistance to a war that most Americans now viewed, at best, as a mistake. This was not just our polemical line of attack, but one basis for the defense, legally and in the court of public opinion, for each case. If the war was wrong logic then dictated that these men were right and deserved praise not punishment. The logic of our polemic notwithstanding, we knew full well that the American public would be far more likely to forgive the war makers than the war resisters who, like the antiwar movement itself, had rubbed their noses in the stench of a sale guerre, a dirty war that, in defeat, would blemish forever the country’s self- image of military invincibility. Those premature moralists who’d left the country, the deserters in particular, could rot in hell most Americans undoubtedly believed when catching the first whispers for amnesty that began to infiltrate the political ether by late 1971. I derive this opinion from the almost universal opposition at the time among elected politicians to anything Tod and I would have considered a just amnesty. For us this was just another lost cause from day one, but we would fight tooth and nail for it because it provided the best available means for continuing to bring discredit upon the Vietnam War. The hot phase of the American War in Indochina was drawing to a close, but the battle for history was only beginning. We admittedly entered this campaign to piggyback the amnesty issue for wider political ends, but we were determined not to use the resisters. We would make it abundantly clear to each man whose return we agreed to sponsor that no guarantees could be offered in terms of avoiding prosecution or penalty. At the same time we believed that by bringing a maximum amount of public pressure and publicity to bear on each test case, the punitive consequences an individual resister faced could be minimized. Indeed, that prediction would prove correct. The selection of the first case would be pivotal in helping to determine the long term validity of our campaign. There were several potential candidates for that initial role, the Paris based-deserter Heflin wrote of among them. But the field of possibilities extended well beyond Paris. Links with the principal communities of exiled deserters, Canada and Sweden, were well-integrated within the GI resistance networks. There were Coffee Houses and counseling centers near most major U.S. military installations where individual GIs, many on orders to the war zone, might make contact with the so-called underground railroad that would spirit them safely to Canada. Those who fled American units based in Germany would be more likely to find themselves in Sweden. The Paris community was relatively small, since France offered resisters political asylum only, not economic assistance and other social benefits available in Sweden and Canada. |
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