Famous Long Ago Michael Uhl 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, stretched 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 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 two doors down from the Gem Spa, the all-night newsstand, an East Village landmark at the corner of St. Marks. The challah French toast 13 Famous Long Ago Michael Uhl 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 matzo ball soup - no chicken stock in a dairy restaurant - and a couple of slices of fresh puffy challah bread smothered in butter. Or I’d alter my route and stop at the Veselka, further up Second Avenue at E. 9th Street, for the Ukrainian version of Jewish penicillin, veal and cabbage soup, or eggs with kielbasa. By the time I reached the elevator of our building I would be carrying a ‘black no sugar’ coffee in one of those cardboard take-out cups ubiquitous 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 coffee - espresso - was sold - were owned by Greeks. Till I was 19, I had never even tasted coffee, finding the aroma unappetizing. Kids where I grew up weren’t big coffee drinkers in those days. Office life made me a java junkie. But it was Brazil that compelled me to drink the beverage for the first time. As a student in Rio, there were occasions when a Brazilian of little means would invite me for a cafezinho; this treat was the most he could afford. For me to say I didn’t consume the national beverage felt like very bad form. I could hardly refuse. The barista would wait till a customer filled his tiny cup with sugar - literally to the brim - before dispensing the black syrupy liquid. Thus when I started drinking coffee regularly as part of the New York office ritual it took about six month, adding a few less granules 14 Famous Long Ago Michael Uhl from the little sugar packets every day, till my coffee was sweetener free. Such was the ideological fervor in those days to eliminate white processed sugar from one’s diet. 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 flyers that called for action from the far flung reaches of the Movement. I would track my mental score card of the Left, its players and competing lines, from such weeklies as the Militant, organ of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the Maoist Guardian, the New Left Liberation News, and that other incendiary tabloid, The Black Panther, along with a host of other counter-cultural and underground periodicals distributed nationwide, some by GIs still on active duty. But Tod and I were also inveterate correspondents, virtually a lost art in today’s era of telegram-style electronic email and messaging. 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 dozens of boxes.2 The letters in those boxes document chronologically and in detail how, between October and December 1971, Tod Ensign 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 15 Famous Long Ago Michael Uhl We quickly assessed the possibilities. 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? This was the conundrum Tod and I had toyed with all that fall of 1971. The most promising avenue pointed to the public discussion increasingly 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? 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, though no one at the time could have predicted they would occur as soon as they did. When asked at a press conference in October 1971 about granting 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 resistance 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 war-generated exile community in the tens of thousands. And that included 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, Jim Reston would report, the Pentagon figure for incidences of desertion - defined as absence from one’s unit for more than thirty days - 16 Famous Long Ago Michael Uhl 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 seek to emphasize, not the resisters of conscience, but the resisters in uniform. Over the course of the Vietnam War there would be more than 500,000 desertions 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 from among these vast numbers those 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 17 Famous Long Ago Michael Uhl 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.