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Murray Polner reviews Peter Brock's These Strange Criminals: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious 0bjectors from the Great War to the Cold War (Toronto, 2004)

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Prison is not a nice place. Peter Brock’s valuable and nuanced collection of the memoirs of 30 former C0s – Americans, Australians, British, Canadians, and New Zealanders – is proof enough. Perhaps the foremost historian of pacifism, Brock was a CO during World War II when he refused induction into the British Army. He was offered a non-combatant post where he would not be required to carry a weapon. For his refusal he spent four months in two prisons.

Four months may not seem like much to people who have never done time. I have not, but having taught in one prison and conducted religious services in another, you have to believe that life in a cage is never easy. Moreover, the governments and its keepers run highly secret institutions where what goes on is kept from a largely uncaring public. We know just as little about, say, maximum-security American prisons today as we do about Guantanamo and what is going on behind its razor wire fences.

While draft counseling during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras I heard some young men say they were unafraid of prison; a handful even tried romanticizing what went on in federal and state lockups. My response then and now is that whatever course of action they chose, prisons were atrocious places where atrocious things often took place.

To be a conscientious objector, especially in a popular war such as World War II, opens the nonviolent dissenter to charges of cowardice and worse by those who believe refusal to serve in the military is unacceptable. Yet now we know that an extraordinarily large number of the pro-war party in Washington’s inner circles evaded military service during America’s wars.

During Vietnam, for example, more men were given CO status the more unpopular the conflict became. Still, some 4000 draft resisters were sent to prison. They were hugely different from one another in their beliefs and reasons for saying “no.” They included Jehovah Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Catholics, Buddhists, Jews and political radicals, all serving alongside murderers, rapists and ordinary criminals. Hardly a monolithic group. Indeed, Philip Berrigan once served his sentence with Mafia gangsters and Jimmy Hoffa.

Among Brock’s memoirists is Donald Benedict, one of the eight students at the Union Theological Seminary who in 1940 famously refused to register for the draft. Benedict served two prison terms. However, during his second term, he began to doubt his pacifist beliefs, and volunteered to serve in the army. He hated the idea of going to war, but had made his decision. Leaving his cell, he was filled with doubt but nevertheless determined to be released and enlist, discharged years after as a sergeant. All the same, as he departed prison, he wrote, “I turned to look back into that cold, dim cell and felt for a moment intense sadness. Something fine was being left behind. Also certitude. Also my youth. I knew I would never come back…”

Another WWII CO, Donald Wetzel, portrayed prison life as reducing any feelings he had for others. “Prison life, as with chronic illness, tends to foster an increasingly petty self-involvement. The prisoner, as with the invalid, largely because he must, turns inward. How else to fit decently within the limits if so shrunken a world?” Realistically, it also “erodes and destroys … the notion, the hope, that some good may come of it. It is as though we asked of the invalid that his illness make him well.”

Jeffrey Porteous was a soldier who refused to go to Vietnam for humanitarian rather than religious reasons. He had asked to be a medic but says the recruiter told him to wait until he reported to camp. Trained as an infantryman, “I told them that I wasn’t going anywhere. You can train me, but I am not going to Vietnam, I’m going to prison.” When released from prison three years later, he wrote on his cell wall: “I’ve been here before you, and I’ve done this, and I’ve kept faith. I keep faith with you who are to follow.” He then signed a waiver stating he would not sue the government and walked out of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth (literally, for twenty miles, to Kansas City), filled with anger. In Days of Decision: An 0ral History of C0s in the Military During Vietnam (Broken Rifle Press, 1989) Porteous told Gerald Gioglio, the book’s editor, “C0s are the young men who have simply said ‘no’ to the old men’s war. No to the sterile blandishments of: Dulce et decorum est pro patria (It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country). And yes to love, yes and yes and yes again to love. Hell, I think we are all C0s—until we are swindled out of it.”

J.K. Osborne, a 27-year-old teacher from Seattle, was sentenced to four years for violating Selective Service regulations. “Four years of my life, for refusing to kill!” he says in fury as well as disbelief. Brock believes 0sborne’s “narrative forms the the most detailed CO prison memoir of the Vietnam era so far published.” Osborne, who was released after eighteen months, describes what most prisoners experience sooner or later: the lack of privacy, powerlessness, having no rights, the fear of rape and violence, the spread of drugs and separation from family. Thankfully, in 0sborne’s case, he made friends among the inmates. A prison official once told me that his maximum security penitentiary held three kinds of prisoners: the incorrigible ones, those who were not much different from the rest of us but who had committed a criminal act and been caught, and the innocent. 0sborne deftly portrays an “incorrigible” friend, in for car theft, who in prison devoured books by Mann, Genet, Proust, Gide, Camus and Faulkner. “I can’t keep up with him in discussions of literature. What an amazing man!” And then he asks a pertinent if unpopular question: “ Is there no other place for him in this world, other than a prison?”

The invasion of Iraq and the imperial ambitions of influential American ideologues have inevitably raised the issue of whether or not to reinstate a draft. Even so, the law recognizing the legitimacy of conscientious objection remains intact –at least thus far. In contrast, other nations, which still maintain conscription, do not recognize the right of conscientious objection. But in all honesty it must recognized that it is always an agonizing decision for people about to be forced into military service to refuse to serve when called. If it is of any help, those who refuse to fight and perhaps to kill are not alone because of the thirty people Peter Brock has memorably anthologized.

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Murray Polner, who served in the army, co-chairs the Jewish Peace Fellowship. He writes frequently for antiwar.com, LewRockwell.com, and other websites.