The Young Antiwar Movement in the United States
On the war? Yes, I was very antiwar. I didn’t think the United States should have been there.
I was a student in 1964. That’s when the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened. I started college that year, and that was the same year as the Gulf of Tonkin incident which they used as an excuse to invade Vietnam. It was sort of a trumped up excuse because the war was never declared. But the government said that this incident between two ships off the coast of Vietnam, an American ship and a Vietnamese ship, was reason to go in and be more aggressive. It started then. The students were really outraged simply because there was never a war declared. They just gave Johnson carte blanche to go in and do whatever he wanted to do without actually declaring war, and it’s illegal! Congress has to declare war.
I’d like to think that we were all really idealistic and we were just motivated by ideals but the fact is, that it was my generation that was going to be drafted. It was our bums that were on the line. America is involved in a lot of wars at the moment, but you don’t see massive student demonstrations against the war. And I think it’s because there’s no draft! They don’t have their own lives on the line.
I was surrounded by people who were antiwar, I wasn’t unusual. I don’t know. I might’ve influenced people of an older generation, to look at it differently, to look at it as a war that was different from World War II. It wasn’t the same thing. We weren’t defending democracy or defending ourselves from attack. Tt was a very different war. Because the attitude always was that if you’re called by your country, you go. So older people had to be made to understand that in fact, going blindly no matter when you’re called to go is not necessarily the best thing to do. There are different kinds of wars.
Well my father is a history teacher and he sort of got it. He understood why. Although they didn’t like what was happening, they understood why it had to happen so there wasn’t so much a divide in my family. Not so much support either. They were sort of annoyed that we were leaving the country but understood why it had to happen. We didn’t get a lot of support but we didn’t get a lot of opposition. Most of the people who got opposition were actual American citizens, men who were going to be drafted and they refused to do it. Those men often got into hot water with their families that would often just cut them off. And that went on, if not forever, for a long, long time. I know one friend of mine, a woman friend who came up with her husband. His mother was convinced he wouldn’t have come up here if it weren’t for his brazen hussy of a wife and she made him do it. She never really gave up the notion that his wife made him do it. I think it was different in each family but especially if they were soldiers in World War II, they just grew up with the notion that you went when you were called. But it was the ones who were drafted who were actually called up. And there weren’t a lot of them because for a long time, the college students were exempted. So I didn’t have a lot to do with people who were drafted till toward the end of the war. But parents did ostracize their sons. It didn’t happen to me, because I couldn’t be drafted. But if their sons were actually called up and refused to go and left the country, some parents never forgave them. Some reconciled later on. Well I wasn’t going to get drafted so I was doing it more out of altruism rather than trying to save my own skin. But I did believe quite passionately that these men shouldn’t be sent over to be killed or kill people either. You’ve got to realize you couldn’t even vote then. You couldn’t vote till you were 21 but you could be drafted when you were 18. Though it just seemed outrageous at all fronts. An outrageous thing to do to young men and to do to Vietnamese. So I was quite passionate about it and felt I wanted to leave the country to support the man I wanted to be with. At the time there was a lot of violence starting at the various counter-culture movements and I really think about it. Do I really want to participate in that? Did I want to be one of these sort of violent revolutionaries? And I didn’t I’d rather just leave.