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Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Keith Mather

Keith Mather: Reminiscences of the Presidio 27

Presidio Trust Oral History Project The Presidio 27

Interviews conducted by Barbara Berglund Sokolov in 2018

Since 1953 the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Keith Mather dated August 17, 2018. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

For information regarding quoting, republishing, or otherwise using this transcript, please consult http://ucblib.link/OHC-rights.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Keith Mather, "Keith Mather: Reminiscences of the Presidio 27" conducted by Barbara Berglund Sokolov in 2018, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.

Keith Mather, 2018

Abstract

Keith Mather was born in 1946 in San Mateo, California. He was drafted in the Army in 1967 during the Vietnam War. He completed Basic Training in Fort Lewis, Washington. He did not return after a Christmas break and was considered AWOL. He joined the War Resisters League and the Nine for Peace demonstration at a church in San Francisco, California. He was arrested for going AWOL and imprisoned in the Presidio Stockade. After an Army prison guard shot and killed prisoner Richard Bunch, Mather participated in the Presidio 27 protest on October 14, 1968. After the trial, he escaped the stockade and fled to Canada. He has since returned to the United States and served the remainder of his sentence. In this interview, Mather discusses his early life; education; relationship with his parents; experience being drafted; completing Basic Training; decision to go AWOL; conditions he endured in the Stockade; dynamics between prisoners; the shooting of Filinako Hemphill; the death of Richard Bunch; organizing the Presidio 27 and participating in the protest; the fallout and trial; decision to escape the stockade; fleeing to Canada; reasons for returning to California; serving the remainder of his sentence; and processing the trauma he experienced during the Vietnam War.

Table of Contents

Presidio Trust Oral History Project History viii

Interview 1: July 31, 2018

Hour 1 1

Birth on November 30, 1946 in San Mateo, California — Move to Sterling, Colorado at age one — Earliest memories — Move to San Bruno, California — Distribution of wealth in San Bruno — Relationship with father during teenage years — Role and influence of religion in family life — Maternal grandfather — Memories of elementary school — Absence at school because of rheumatic fever — Move to California serving as an "awakening" — Expulsion from school and adolescent "rebellious streak" — Physical fights in high school — Arrest at eighteen years old — Theft of a car at sixteen years old — Aspirations in gymnastics and dancing — Decision to do the GED — Family's views of the Vietnam War — Struggle with the idea of being drafted — Driveaway from Los Angeles to New York — Trip to Toronto — Hitchhiking back home from Toronto — Getting drafted in 1967 — Family's reaction to Mather's draft — Pleasant memories of life after high school

Hour 2 22

Basic training in Fort Lewis and first impressions of the military — Challenging drills — Going home for Christmas and returning late — Wanting and plotting how to leave the military — Running away from the service and going AWOL — Feelings of paranoia in light of FBI searches — Reaching out to the War Resisters League — Father's reaction to Mather going AWOL — The Nine for Peace — Reverend Phil Farnham's role in the protest — Impact of Nine for Peace experience on Mather's political understanding — Jack Robinson's twenty-eight- day fast — Consequences and punishments for the Nine for Peace participants — Decision to be part of the Nine for Peace — Power and support surrounding the Nine for Peace

Interview 2: August 14, 2018

Hour 1 39

First time going AWOL during training — Ways of being punished after going AWOL — Punishment after going back after the Nine for Peace — Being singled out in the group in terms of consequences — Conditions and overcrowding in the Presidio Stockade — Acts of defiance in the stockade — Response to various forms of nonviolent protesting in the jail — Fighting against solitary incarceration within the jail — Suicidal tendencies within the stockade — Shooting of Filinako Hemphill — Influence of music — Watching Soul Train in the stockade — More fond memories in the stockade — Getting visitors in the stockade — Relationship

with Adrienne Fong — Putting the uniform back on to be tried — Walter Pawlowski — Reason for Pawlowski's arrest — Richard Bunch's death — Coming to terms with what had happened to Bunch — Rebellion throughout the prison after the Bunch shooting

Hour 2 63

Events that led up to the Presidio mutiny — How the mutiny was executed — Significance of the prisoners singing and linking arms — Reasons for participating in the mutiny — Helping to organize the Presidio 27 — Emotions and feelings when the mutiny began — Attending Bunch's funeral service — Being put in solitary confinement after the mutiny — Feelings surrounding mutiny charge — Personal belief regarding reason for mutiny charge — Sentences for a "nonviolent demonstration within a stockade" — How the Presidio 27 escalated the GI movement — Ronald Lockman's story — Decision and plan to escape the stockade — Trial and being sentenced — Treatment while being transported to different trial locations — Demographic of the stockade — Discussion with Steve Reese — What Mather wants to be remembered about the Presidio 27 — Importance in remembering the resistance to the Vietnam War — Personal effect of involvement in the Presidio 27 — Every participant as a leader of the mutiny

Interview 3: August 16, 2018

Hour 1 78

Memories of the trial — Jack Robinson being called as witness — Interaction with legal counsel during the trial — Official charges — Shows of resistance in the Presidio Stockade — Other witnesses — Press coverage of the trial — Trials becoming referendums on issues surrounding the war — Knowing he was going to be found guilty even before getting the verdict — Sentence of four years in prison and a dishonorable discharge — Story of the leather ring — Reaching out to and remaining friends with the woman who gave him the ring — Different supporters during the trial — Arrest of protesters at the end of the trial — Decision to plan an escape — Planning and executing the escape — Getting advice and counsel from other resisters — Sharing needles to get hepatitis for escape purposes — Escape to Canada — Being too emotional to see siblings — Father Joe Sontag's role in Mather's escape — Rule against phone calls being made from the downtown hotel room — Discussion with Roger Broomfield on the phone for the first time since the escape — Mike Marino's failed escape attempts — Mather's mixed emotions regarding escape — Other escapees who lived with Mather in Vancouver — Meeting and marrying Nancy LaPlante — Searching for and finding a stable living situation in Canada — Moving around Canada with wife and children — Diverse area of Edgewood — Return to the United States in 1980

Hour 2 97

Moving back in with parents in San Bruno — Family's reaction to Mather's return — Work with the Carpenters Union — Dating — New experiences being limited by legal situation — Getting caught by the San Bruno Police in 1984 — Getting things set up for his children before going back to jail — Transportation to Fort Ord — Solitary confinement in Fort Ord Stockade — Choosing Howard De Nike as attorney — Press surrounding legal situation — Hanging dishonorable discharge on the wall — Imprisonment at Fort Ord for nearly six months — Visitors while in Fort Ord — Falling down the stairs at Fort Ord — Move to Fort Riley — Experience at Fort Riley during four-month imprisonment — Difficulty in having children visit prisoners — Preaching to the other soldiers about Central American resistance and the different responses — Being released from Fort Riley in 1985 and returning to California — Press interest in Mather's story following release — Jay Mathews publishing an article on Mather — Delayed effect from being exposed in the press — Work with the city in 2002 — Writing workshop for veterans — Feelings surrounding having personal story told in various outlets — Relief when legal issues were finally settled — Desire to write a book — Trouble with explaining story when meeting new people — How the writing process helps to digest life experiences — Influence of the future during involvement with the Nine for Peace and the Presidio 27 — Lack of patriotic feelings on days like Independence Day — Trip to Vietnam — Initial reaction to Mather from the Vietnamese upon hearing his story — What Mather wants people to learn from his story — Hopes for the next generation — Feelings about being on the Presidio today — Hopes for personal future — Closing remarks

Presidio Trust Oral History Project History

The Presidio of San Francisco is a new kind of national park. It is home to the spectacular vistas, nature, and programs that visitors would expect, as well as a community of residents and organizations who bring renewed vitality and purpose to this former military post. The Presidio Trust is an innovative federal agency created to save the Presidio and share it with the public.

The Presidio Trust Oral History Project captures new layers of the history of the Presidio. The project complements ongoing archaeological research and fulfills historic preservation obligations through interviews with people associated with the Presidio of San Francisco, for example: former soldiers, nurses, doctors, civilian workers, military families, descendants of Californios and Native Californians; environmental groups; and Presidio Trust and National Park Service employees. The interviews capture a range of experiences, including the legacies of colonialism, stories of service and sacrifice, the role of the Presidio in a range of global conflicts, everyday life on the post, and of how this post became a park. The Presidio Trust and the Oral History Center have embarked on a multiyear collaboration to produce these oral histories.

The goals of the Presidio Trust Oral History Project/Presidio are twofold. First, to create new knowledge about life on the post during peacetime, as well as during global conflicts, that illuminates the diversity of experiences and the multiplicity of voices that is the essence of Presidio history. And second, to share this knowledge with the public in ways that leverage the power of first-person narratives to allow people to see themselves reflected in the Presidio's past so they feel connected to its present. The kinds of questions we seek to answer include: "How can the Presidio's military legacy inform our national intentions?" and "How can examining the cultural mosaic of people living in and around the Presidio shape our understanding of the nation?"

The Presidio 27

On October 14, 1968, 27 prisoners in the Presidio Stockade broke ranks during roll call formation, sat down in a circle in the grassy yard, joined arms, sang "We Shall Overcome," and asked to present a list of demands to the stockade commander that addressed the treatment of fellow prisoners and the conditions inside. Just days before a guard had shot and killed a prisoner, and GIs had taken to the streets of San Francisco in massive demonstrations against the war that came right up to the Presidio's gates—the first anti-war marches organized by GIs and veterans in the nation. For staging this peaceful protest, amidst the heightened tensions of a country increasingly divided over the Vietnam War, the Army tried the twenty-seven for mutiny, the most serious military offense. The actions of the twenty-seven and their subsequent trials made headlines, shocked the Army and the nation, brought the GI movement onto the national stage, inspired the anti-war movement, catalyzed improvements in US military prisons around the world, and ultimately helped to end the Vietnam War.

In 1968, as more and more soldiers began questioning the Vietnam War, going AWOL (absent without leave), and deserting the military, many flocked to San Francisco's counterculture. Those who turned themselves in or were picked up by authorities were brought to the Presidio, the nearest Army post, and held in the stockade. As its population swelled to nearly twice what it was designed to hold, stockade conditions became increasingly chaotic and overcrowded, a

Copyright © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley ix ticking time bomb. The average age of the Presidio 27 was nineteen and all were AWOLs. Most were from working-class backgrounds, some came from career military families, and only five had finished high school. Their convictions for mutiny came with sentences ranging from six months to sixteen years. Years later—and only after great personal hardship and sacrifice on the part of the Presidio 27, including years spent in federal prison—the military overturned their convictions on appeal and reduced their sentences. In the end, the appeals judge found that rather than intending to usurp or override lawful military authority, requirements for the charge of mutiny, the Presidio 27, in reading their demands to their commanding officers, were actually invoking and imploring the very military authority they had been charged with seeking to override.

Interview 1: July 31, 2018

01-00:00:01 Berglund Sokolov: This is Barbara Berglund Sokolov here with Keith Mather at the Presidio of San Francisco, and we're here today to talk about Keith's involvement with the Presidio 27 in 1968. We're going to start the story with Keith's early life. Keith, do you want to tell us a little bit about how you came into the world?

01-00:00:24 Mather: [laughing] Well, sure. My mom and dad met sometime during the war, working in the shipyards together, building Liberty ships and other vessels. They moved down to Brisbane from Richmond, where they were working, so I was born in San Mateo.

01-00:00:48 Berglund Sokolov: What year were you born, Keith?

01-00:00:49 Mather: 1946, November 30. An interesting story my mother always tried to tell and just charmed me, for sure, she'd say, "Well, you know, I had him on the 30th, and I brought him home on my birthday," which was December 3, which was always just the sweetest thing to hear her talk about. So that's such a big influence in my life.

01-00:01:15 Berglund Sokolov: You were her birthday present.

01-00:01:18 Mather: Yeah. She might have thought better of that later. [laughter] But nevertheless, we lived in Brisbane. When I was born I think I had jaundice, and I was not that healthy looking. That's pretty normal in my family I've found, in most of the children.

01-00:01:43 Berglund Sokolov: You were in Colorado when that happened?

01-00:01:45 Mather: No, I was here. I was here until I was a year old. We stayed here in Brisbane, and about the time I was a year old we moved because my dad, his mom and dad were in Sterling, Colorado, where we were going. My mother didn't want to go, but she went. My dad and my grandfather were in the plumbing business together.

01-00:02:09 Berglund Sokolov: And tell us what your parents' names were?

01-00:02:14 Mather: Oh yeah. My father was Lee R. Mather and my mother was Ernestine Lee. It's interesting—my father had the first name Lee, and she had the last name Lee.

01-00:02:28 Berglund Sokolov: Wow. What did your dad do for a living?

01-00:02:34 Mather: Anything—he could do anything. I have to say that, number one. But he initially was a shipfitter, a boilermaker, a welder. Structural steel fabricator, wrought-iron worker, sheet metalworker, siding. He was a general contractor for years, towards his later years, but he also x-rayed all the welds on the BART tube that they sank under the Bay and was involved in BART when it was going in. He was an owner's representative/inspector on high-rises, steel structural high-rises around the country, until he blew his leg out and couldn't do it anymore, got too old [and] you know, retired.

01-00:03:24 Berglund Sokolov: What are some of your earliest memories of your parents when you think back?

01-00:03:32 Mather: Well, I think back to Colorado and going to Pioneer Park and being able to go to the huge pool. There's a monster pool, with three diving boards and different elevations, and a big playground and things like that. We got to go and do that, but we got to run around. We got to run around at night. We got to walk four or five blocks to the corner store to get cigarettes for my father when I was like six, and things like that. He never got any change back, and he knew that. [laughter] So that was that. But that kind of thing, and also we did little celebrations on May Day, where you take a May basket to your best friend's door. Kind of Colorado prairies, the northeastern corner near Kansas, dust storms, you know, dust storms that would blow the door open and fill the house with dust and roll the carpets up. It was kind of interesting times.

01-00:04:34 Berglund Sokolov: What town were you in?

01-00:04:35 Mather: Sterling.

01-00:04:36 Berglund Sokolov: Sterling.

01-00:04:37 Mather: Yeah, it's near Brush and Greeley.

01-00:04:41 Berglund Sokolov: Cattle country, sort of?

01-00:04:44 Mather: Well, corn, yeah. Corn, and I guess it'd be sweet potatoes. Sugar beets, that was the other thing they grew a lot there. Big train tracks went through the town, and going to things like the county fair. I will never forget the county

fair, which I'll tell a little episode of. My mother wanted to make sure I had a great time, and so she wanted me to go on rides—but she didn't want to go. She put me on the Ferris wheel, and the guy running it—my mother was a very attractive woman, and he didn't want her to walk away with me, so he kept me up there. That's my theory, anyway, because I was up there a really long time, and it was really cold and windy and the thing was rocking, and I got scared. He passed me by a couple of times, letting everybody else— giving me an extra ride. I was losing it, and so he got me within about fifteen feet of the ground, and I jumped! Yeah. That's one memory that I've got. [laughter]

01-00:06:00 Berglund Sokolov: I'm sure that didn't make too great of an impression on your mom in the long run, right?

01-00:06:04 Mather: [laughing] Yeah, yeah. She'd just shake her head. Every time I'd tell that story she'd just shake her head.

01-00:06:12 Berglund Sokolov: What about brothers and sisters?

01-00:06:13 Mather: Oh yeah. Well, when they came along—I had a big sister all along, my sister Paula, who's about five years older than me from a previous marriage.

01-00:06:27 Berglund Sokolov: Your mom's previous marriage?

01-00:06:29 Mather: Yeah, my mom's previous marriage.

01-00:06:30 Berglund Sokolov: Okay.

01-00:06:33 Mather: I had a big sister and that was always great, for me to bug, somebody to help watch me. I think she was a big help to my mother during all those times too. Shortly after—I think I was about five, I think I was in school— my mother became pregnant again and had my brother Kirk in Sterling, in the summer. We lived there until '56-'57, right in there, and then moved.

I remember helping my father build a trailer, because we wanted to bring all our stuff with us and couldn't afford a moving company or any of that, so he built the trailer. He was a steelworker, put tandem axles on it, and I laid underneath it and held the wrench so he could tighten the things on the other side, when I was young—nine or ten. We loaded everything in that, and he had a 1948 Town and Country, Chrysler Town and Country convertible. Now it's worth a hundred grand—probably, and he towed that trailer out with it. The hitch broke once. He got it into a shop and used the guy's

welding machine to fix it. The guy offered him a job and he said, "No, I'm moving." So that's why I say he was really talented. He was really talented.

We got out to California, staying with relatives for a little while, and we were back in Brisbane. Shortly after that, not that long—maybe a year at the most—we moved to San Bruno, where I was raised the rest of the time.

01-00:08:45 Berglund Sokolov: What are some of your memories about growing up in San Bruno?

01-00:08:49 Mather: Yeah, San Bruno was very interesting because it was a working-class neighborhood and surrounded, on some level, by maybe—not upper middle class, but more middle-class surroundings, where you'd have like— somebody, maybe a house had two incomes instead of one. I went to schools where the distribution of wealth was very obvious. It was just extremely obvious, where people lived, the streets I walked down to school—I went to good schools in very nice neighborhoods.

01-00:09:31 Berglund Sokolov: You went to public schools?

01-00:09:32 Mather: I went to public schools.

01-00:09:34 Berglund Sokolov: And this would have been mid-'50s?

01-00:09:36 Mather: I'd say '50—I guess '53 through my schooling. The junior high school I went to in Millbrae, Taylor Elementary—it was an excellent school. It just was. We had really good teachers. It was very strict there, and either you learned or you didn't. But that's the one I had to repeat a grade in, but nevertheless, they were strict. Maybe we should talk about that right now.

01-00:10:16 Berglund Sokolov: Well, and let me back you up a little bit and just ask, because it was really interesting, when you were talking about the distribution of wealth in San Bruno.

01-00:10:23 Mather: Yeah, right, yeah.

01-00:10:25 Berglund Sokolov: Is that something that you were aware of at the time, or more in retrospect?

01-00:10:32 Mather: No, I was aware of it then, but I think I could blow it off easier, because like—I was cool, number one. [laughing]

01-00:10:38 Berglund Sokolov: Did it matter in everyday life?

01-00:10:40 Mather: Not in the final analysis. I was not hyperaware of it, but I was aware of it when somebody else was dropped off by their parents in a brand-new car, and I was walking to school because my mother did not drive. You could kind of feel it, you know? I mean— that was fine. That's just the way it was. I didn't mind walking home, to tell you the truth.

01-00:11:02 Berglund Sokolov: Did you have friends from different socioeconomic backgrounds?

01-00:11:08 Mather: Yeah, mostly from my neighborhood, to be honest. Mostly from my neighborhood, and a few a little bit outside my neighborhood that really maybe had a single mom. There were those situations.

01-00:11:22 Berglund Sokolov: Would you notice things when you went to people's? You mentioned the dropping off and cars.

01-00:11:27 Mather: Oh sure.

01-00:11:28 Berglund Sokolov: But I'm thinking of going to people's houses.

01-00:11:31 Mather: Oh, of course.

01-00:11:31 Berglund Sokolov: And oh, these people lived differently.

01-00:11:32 Mather: You know, with phony jewels encrusted on their dining room chairs. Just some weird, garish, kitschy kind of stuff. During the same time, my mother would find furniture and refinish it and have it in the home. That's what I'm sitting in at home now, things she refinished. It was really frugal, never waste. A $20 bill would buy the groceries for the week for a family of seven, and she'd make it work, you know?

01-00:12:08 Berglund Sokolov: Did you feel like, given your parents' efforts, that you grew up in a comfortable home and had what you needed?

01-00:12:16 Mather: Yeah, absolutely. I never went hungry. I was never cold. I never wanted for much. Maybe I wanted more sweaters, or maybe I wanted another pair of tennis shoes, or maybe I wanted more money in my pocket. But in general— even the people who were—I was fortunate. It was surfer time too, so

everybody was wearing t-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes. Period. That was it. So everybody was dressed the same anyway.

01-00:12:54 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

01-00:12:55 Mather: When they'd drive to school in a brand—in high school they'd drive to school in a brand new [Chevy] 409—brand new, brand new! How do you do that, you know? I didn't feel bad about it, but I said, "Are you lucky. Can I have a ride?" We'd go out and race, and I'd sit alongside of him or whatever. But I was really happy when I got my dad's car. That was a big deal.

01-00:13:23 Berglund Sokolov: What kind of car was it?

01-00:13:24 Mather: It was a '57 Chevy station wagon. Yeah, it was a nice wagon, and I had that for about three years, and that was a big deal. I wish I had it now. [laughing]

01-00:13:34 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, you mentioned that you were considered cool when you were growing up? What did that mean?

01-00:13:40 Mather: Whether I was considered cool or not?

01-00:13:42 Berglund Sokolov: Or you thought you were cool?

01-00:13:43 Mather: I considered myself cool. I never doubted that. I look at it always this way. If you're really cool, you don't have to really discuss much. I think I just gravitated toward guys that maybe were interested in the same things I was. I was a gymnast, so the guys on the gymnastics team I'm still close friends with, three of them. I was a wrestler for a year, and I'm not really close to any of those guys, but I know them and I saw them at my fiftieth high school reunion—and they reminded me of the match I lost. [laughter] And the fight in the street I lost, and things like that. Maybe that's why I became a pacifist.

Yeah, I mean, high school was fun. High school was really fun. I learned how to dance in junior high, and I involved myself in dance contests. I won a few. I worked in a teen lounge, the Bossa Nova Teen Lounge in San Bruno. We had bands come, and we had dance contests. The alcohol was in your car outside. And I had a job there, but then when I was winning all the contests people were beginning to look at me sideways, and so I quit before the last contest, and I won it—but I quit.

01-00:15:32 Berglund Sokolov: And you quit because—?

01-00:15:33 Mather: It was a conflict. "Oh, the guy who works there won." Come on. So I wouldn't let nobody think that. That was me protecting my reputation I guess, at that point in time. [laughter]

01-00:15:47 Berglund Sokolov: Tell me a little bit about what your relationship was like at home.

01-00:15:53 Mather: Sure.

01-00:15:53 Berglund Sokolov: With your mom, with your dad, as you were in those teen years.

01-00:16:00 Mather: Yeah, it was like I think most boys, most men, have some kind of a conflict, at some point in time, with their father. I think that's pretty normal. It's a necessity, on some level. My dad and I—he didn't know how to do any different than he did, so I don't blame him, but it was hard. It was heartbreaking on some level, because what I perceived as a level of insensitivity and harshness was really, as far as I can figure out now, was a way of him protecting me and preparing me for life. That's what he thought he was doing—at a very young age. [laughing] Which was not necessary, in any case.

01-00:16:53 Berglund Sokolov: There might have been a little bit of overkill at that juncture, yeah?

01-00:16:56 Mather: Well, he was compensating there, I think. Also too, my dad didn't have much coming up, growing up. His dad had a stroke when he was in high school. He had to quit high school and go to work, so anything I had—so much more than he had—it was like, "Oh, come on—what are you complaining about? You've got it good." He could never see, really, my needs because of his own experience. And I kind of know that now, but his behavior at times was not helpful. He was not often angry or violent or anything like that. He didn't drink at home. My mother wouldn't allow it till we were all grown. But when he'd yell at my mom, and they'd get in fights. Not a lot, but when they did, it was really hard on me, because I would be protective and want to intercede. That was not a good idea, and I did it only a few times. Just stood up, "No, don't yell at Mom," because she was getting upset. But they were good; they generally were good together.

My brother Kim was born in Brisbane—I want to get back to that—before we moved to San Bruno. I remember him coming in the house and going into the crib right about the time we got a color television, which was kind of more important, actually. [laughter] And may still be. No, it wasn't a color television, it was just a television, that's right.

01-00:18:47 Berglund Sokolov: A black and white at that point, probably.

01-00:18:47 Mather: Yeah, black and white, and rabbit ears, and the whole thing. My dad always said, "I think I'll get a color TV when they perfect it." Time went on. I became the TV Guide, pretty well. [laughing] And the remote. Yeah, those were good times. I think the best part of that day was watching my brother Kirk, who was now—I don't know, maybe seven—pulling this cardboard box that the TV came in into the other room, sneaking the box away to play in.

01-00:19:37 Berglund Sokolov: To build a fort or something?

01-00:19:38 Mather: Yeah, to have his own space. Have his own space. I have all these brothers and sisters—I'm going to break it down so it's easy. I've got Paula, who's five years older than me; Kirk, who's five years younger than me; Kim is approximately ten years younger than me; and then Penny, of course, who's about fifteen years younger. Every period of time when one of us would start school, another one would be coming along. It was very interesting. It was kind of like there was a—I always think anyway, and I think it happened a lot like that, because you felt that you could turn your attention to another child.

But I don't see how my dad did it, on one income, the five kids. We have all the needs of every other kid. Ten pairs of shoes a year, or something. How did you figure out to do that; how did you do that? But I give him a lot of credit for just being really hard working. I never saw him miss a day's work; I don't think he could. My mother was—I remember very clearly her wearing threadbare housedresses, and cleaning, and going up to the neighbor's house and tending him when he was ill, and befriending the neighbors across the street. She even took in a Vietnam vet later on and allowed him to live in a room in her home and helped him till he passed away. Took him to the hospital, and then spread his ashes. So this is who raised me.

01-00:21:22 Berglund Sokolov: Well, and you had mentioned that being raised Baptist and growing up in that supportive church community was really significant. It sounds like it might have shaped some of the charitable kinds of actions, aside from just who she was as a person, but the way your mother approached the world.

01-00:21:42 Mather: Well, I think it was based on her raising. Her father was a Baptist minister, and he didn't have a church, per se, because he needed to make a living. He was a farmer, but he was an ordained minister. He would go into other churches, other ministers' churches for services, and if he thought that they

were a little off center, he'd stand up and correct them, and quote the Bible, chapter and verse, from memory. And that was that. Especially the fire-and- brimstone guys; he didn't like that. One thing I'd say about him, he wouldn't do weddings. He'd only do funerals because there were no more lies to tell, I think. His words, not mine. [laughing]

01-00:22:32 Berglund Sokolov: Not a romantic.

01-00:22:34 Mather: Well, he'd seen a lot. The Ku Klux Clan, and he lived in Oklahoma, and he'd seen a lot of stuff. He was a pretty wise guy. He was a vegetarian, a farmer. He was limber. Into his seventies he could fold into a position and walk on his knees. He was a pretty amazing guy! Pretty amazing guy. I don't know— and his name was Robert E. Lee.

01-00:23:12 Berglund Sokolov: Did you see him very often growing up?

01-00:23:16 Mather: Probably three or four times really, you know? But it had such a big impression on me when I was there, on the farm, for six weeks. That was big, really big. I'll never forget it. They had their own swimming hole, called the strip pit, because it was a strip mine, a coal mine. There were snakes in it, and fish and turtles and stuff. But it was like, you know, you back a car onto a big plank and then use it as a diving board, jump off into the strip pit. I remember that. I remember being able to ride his plow horse. He wasn't plowing, but he put me on the plow horse and walked me around with it. I've got a photo of that. I mean that kind of experience was always this experience sitting there and would come to life when I would go to the country or get out of town, things like that.

I have another sibling. [laughing] My little sister Penny, who was born when my mom was about forty-five. It seems to have just gone on from there. All of us have had kids, and they've had kids, and some of them have had kids. So here we sit. My mom and dad are both gone, so I'm the next generation closest to the exit door, and it feels right. Something about this feels right. Don't ask me why it feels right, but it does. [laughing] It feels like things are in the right place.

01-00:25:13 Berglund Sokolov: To be telling your story at this time?

01-00:25:16 Mather: This part, this time in my life, having a viewpoint about my story, having digested a lot of it, experienced most of it, you know? I think I have distance from a lot of it. A lot of it's very visceral, and when I think about things sometimes my emotions rise. But at the same time, it's distant. You know,

I've lived there many years, lived in all these places many years, so some of them aren't as exciting as they used to be—to tell.

01-00:25:53 Berglund Sokolov: Do you want to talk a little bit about school?

01-00:25:56 Mather: Sure.

01-00:25:56 Berglund Sokolov: How [do] you and school fit together?

01-00:25:58 Mather: Sure. I think I had a good time when I was little, in school, playing marbles and stuff like that, running around, chasing dust devils in the playground. But when I got to California, it was like awakening. When I was in Colorado it was like I wasn't aware. I was a kid, didn't care how my hair was parted, all that. I reached a point where I realized that maybe I wasn't cool, or that was cooler or something. I had to have those shoes, like every kid.

01-00:26:42 Berglund Sokolov: You were kind of on the verge of adolescence when you got here?

01-00:26:44 Mather: Yeah, exactly, exactly. That was right about the time as I was in elementary school—or junior high school, when Buddy Holly went down in the airplane and all these things were going on, right? The civil rights movement was happening. You could see it on TV once in a while, but really isolated in Millbrae, California, very isolated. A very soft life, Millbrae-Burlingame. It's kind of a nice zone. I lived in Lomita Park, so which was a working-class neighborhood, but a good one, with these four brothers and sisters, I spent a lot of time gone, out of the house, because what am I going to do? I'd come home and play with my brothers, and play with everybody, and then I'd take off.

01-00:27:41 Berglund Sokolov: And that was pretty typical for the time?

01-00:27:41 Mather: Yeah, you'd go to the park, or go to a friend's house, try to go over to your girlfriend's house or your boyfriend's—whatever the situation was. The high school period of time, the first years for me were pretty—as I mentioned earlier—I did eighth grade twice, so before I even got to high school I was becoming somewhat rebellious.

01-00:28:06 Berglund Sokolov: You were a little older too, right?

01-00:28:08 Mather: Yeah, I was a year older than most of the kids.

01-00:28:09 Berglund Sokolov: You'd been held back because you were sick with rheumatic fever?

01-00:28:14 Mather: Yeah, I couldn't go to school. The doctor said don't go to school, so I didn't go to school. I remember that was a painful experience, having rheumatic fever, because of the aches that you get from it. But that's all I remember, really. I don't remember too much. I remember being inside a lot. [laughing] I remember all the comic books I had too, so it was an interesting time. I think my mother and I—she nursed me through it, so we became even closer, I guess, if you can say that.

Coming to California, like I said, was like really an awakening. I started to grow up and realized what was and what wasn't. But I was still dealing with this rebelliousness that I had from my father. I was still dealing with growing up and not wanting people to tell me what to do—anybody of authority, in other words: a bus driver, a teacher—didn't matter. A bus driver wouldn't let me on the bus. It was just bad, really, that's the kind of an attitude I had. It was like one day the girls would get on first, the bus, the next day, the boys. It was like diplomatic, or democratic. This new bus driver came along and said, "No, girls first." I said, "Fuck you." [making a short whistling sound] "You're walking." "Okay." I got to school and the word already had gotten there that I had had a little problem with the bus driver. I got a talking to. I said, "I'm sorry."

01-00:29:50 Berglund Sokolov: What grade were you when that happened?

01-00:29:53 Mather: It was eighth grade. I was angry at that point, because I was feeling a little embarrassed probably. I went into science class, and the teacher was doing some experiment where the CO2 cartridge—just shoot it across a little wire, or something like that. It didn't work, and I laughed, and I laughed. I couldn't stop laughing. He said something kind of harsh to me, and I just went off, just again, boom, and I got expelled. [laughing] It was pretty simple. I got expelled.

01-00:30:44 Berglund Sokolov: That was all in one day?

01-00:30:46 Mather: That was one day, yeah. Something was wrong that day.

01-00:30:49 Berglund Sokolov: But there had been other things going on where you had—your rebellious streak was kind of showing in other ways?

01-00:30:56 Mather: Yeah, probably so.

01-00:30:59 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

01-00:30:59 Mather: In my youth, in my childhood, childish ways. I would be angry at home and punch a hole in the wall, just be furious, things like that. I don't know where all that came from. I don't feel that way today.

01-00:31:15 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, when you had the fateful day in eighth grade, how did your parents react to that, or how did they react to your other anti-authority, rebellious moments?

01-00:31:26 Mather: They weren't sure about me. They weren't sure about me at that point. They were going, "Oh my goodness, Keith. I guess you've made your bed," so to speak. It was like well, look at the hell you created for yourself, was kind of the way it was put to me. I did things like, when I was expelled, I went out and got drunk. I didn't drink much before that, drink vodka and hang out with my buddies and listen to music. It was a precursor to the later sixties, I think. [laughter] But yeah, I had nothing else to do. Try to find somebody to hang out with—all my friends were at school, so I'd hang out with a little older people that had access to cars and alcohol. So you know, that was okay. I didn't get hurt or nothing—could have but didn't.

01-00:32:20 Berglund Sokolov: Did you get into fights during this time, physical fights?

01-00:32:22 Mather: A little earlier in life I got into fights. Not too many then, like in my eighth grade. A few later and a few earlier. I got in one, I guess I would say. I got in one, yeah. It was a thing at Taylor—there used to be a hill in back of Taylor that now is houses.

01-00:32:43 Berglund Sokolov: And Taylor is the school.

01-00:32:44 Mather: In Millbrae, yeah. We'd say, "Hey, meet you on the hill after school, all right? You want to fight? After school." So this football player guy, flag football player guy, okay? He called me out, so I went up there and we punched at each other and hit each other a few times. It got to the point where we knew we couldn't beat each other, either one of us, and so we just said, "Okay, cool. Good enough." [laughing] We were both bleeding, and someone says, "We're fine." I kind of lost interest early on with that. My freshman year in high school, certainly, I was in fights. If you wanted to go to school where I went to school you had to be prepared to fight. I'm sorry, if you were me, you had to be prepared to fight.

01-00:33:38 Berglund Sokolov: Why is that?

01-00:33:39 Mather: I didn't take anything off anybody—just didn't. It was a rule. You just didn't do that then. You didn't do that.

01-00:33:53 Berglund Sokolov: Was it a way to prove yourself, like where you were in the high school pecking order or that kind of thing?

01-00:34:00 Mather: Not so much—well, yeah, to a certain extent I wouldn't argue with that. But it was more, for me, like a rule. You've got to protect yourself at all times. You have to be ready to fight, because I'd been in situations where I had to go fight, and so I might as well be ready all the time and be willing. It would be nothing to just go—just see somebody in a car and they give you an attitude and you go, "Pull over." That simple. You talk about road rage today? It's nothing compared to what we were doing. We were going out and searching for people to fight with, you know? Or there'd be other groups of guys in a car, four or five guys in a car, and we'd be four and five guys in a car, or there'd be a party or there'd be—like we had big bonfires, so there was a huge bonfire in this vacant lot, and the big crowning thing was that two or three fights would go on. If you went to a party, a fight was part of it, you know? Go to the drive-in, no, to the movie, to Mel's, places like that. You'd leave there and go fight. I've even seen fights at drag—after drag races. So yeah, street fighting was something we did, something we did. And I went to jail over it, too.

01-00:35:22 Berglund Sokolov: Did you really?

01-00:35:22 Mather: Yeah.

01-00:35:24 Berglund Sokolov: When?

01-00:35:25 Mather: When I was eighteen. A friend of mine and I, or two friends of mine and I were involved—fighting with three sailors. We started it, and I got my ass handed to me pretty good. One of the guys, one of my friends from school, pulled over and grabbed a crescent wrench and went out and hit this sailor in the back of the head, put him in the hospital. I didn't do that, but I was eighteen, so him and I got the rap for that. We got the charges dropped, but we also submitted an apology to the guy. I did, even though I didn't do it. We washed the cells in San Bruno Jail. That was illuminating, to say the least.

01-00:36:23 Berglund Sokolov: Was that your first time in jail?

01-00:36:28 Mather: Let me think. No. [laughing] The first time I was in jail was for grand theft auto when I was probably sixteen. Yeah. Yeah, stole a car. I wanted a driver's license—didn't even have a driver's license. Wanted a driver's license. I didn't get it till I was seventeen, but that was probably wise. Yeah, I was kind of a loose cannon, you know? I wanted a girlfriend; I wanted a car. I wanted out of the house; I wanted a job. I wanted to be a dancer or a stuntman. I had all these ideas, sure. At the same time, as time crept on, in high school, once in a while you'd see something in the school paper about somebody you didn't know who maybe had graduated a few years before you who was dead, killed in Vietnam. Not too many, not too many really. I don't know the number that the school lost in that period of time but there wasn't very many, and I don't think my class lost very many in Vietnam, [the class of] '66.

01-00:37:47 Berglund Sokolov: Did you feel that when you were in high school like you had aspirations to do things but not a pathway to get there to do them? Like you were talking about stuntman, or other kinds of things.

01-00:38:01 Mather: Well, there were no schools, in those days, for stuntmen, like there are today. It was all OJT [on-the-job training]. You were a cowboy, or something like that. But I was a gymnast, so I figured, well, I know how to roll, I know how to fall, plus you can learn stuff. I took all the acting classes I could, and things like that, and was in plays—and I could dance. So it was like, I think I can do this. I went and enrolled in a San Francisco school for junior ballet, and I didn't go for very long. I couldn't get there, I just couldn't get there.

01-00:38:39 Berglund Sokolov: The transportation issue.

01-00:38:40 Mather: Yeah, I couldn't get there. It was just too much.

01-00:38:43 Berglund Sokolov: How old were you when you did that?

01-00:38:47 Mather: I was seventeen, sixteen [or] seventeen. I tried it for the summer, and I just couldn't get there. But it was a lot of fun, and it introduced me to a little bit of formal training. My drama coach, Kenneth Ton, who was a mentor to Suzanne Somers—Suzanne Mahoney is her real name. I went to school with her and was in plays with her as well, and yeah, we had a really good time. I thought I might go in that direction, because it sounded really easy. Of course, it's not—and I didn't. But those were my thoughts then.

01-00:39:36 Berglund Sokolov: Can we back up to eighth grade?

01-00:39:37 Mather: Sure.

01-00:39:38 Berglund Sokolov: Because eighth grade was where you got expelled, and then that led to you having to redo that year.

01-00:39:44 Mather: Yeah.

01-00:39:45 Berglund Sokolov: Did that have any kind of impact on you going forward into high school?

01-00:39:51 Mather: Yeah, a lot of my friends went on to high school, and that was hard. That was hard. But they weren't there when I went back to the eighth grade, you see? So I didn't have to deal with them, okay? There was all these people there, and I already did this, and so there was a kind of weird credibility, if you get my drift.

01-00:40:11 Berglund Sokolov: Were you considered a bad kid at that point?

01-00:40:15 Mather: To a certain extent. There was another time there, and I think it was my first year in eighth grade—must have been, although I may be wrong—but we had straw hat day, and so everybody would wear a straw hat. It was hot— probably not this time of year—but it was hot. We're all sitting outside on the lawn, out on the field, and they said, "Okay," ding ding, "Time to go in." We go, "Oh, we don't want to go back in. It's too nice." This guy Bob Hawks, my across-the-street neighbor, I'll never forget it, he goes, "Don't go in." Wow. "Anybody goes in, and I'll kick your ass," or something like that, right? So about thirty or forty of us didn't go in. We said no. We just sat outside and said no. They made us go into detention for weeks after that, writing, "I will not be a sheep. I will not follow," on the blackboard.

01-00:41:24 Berglund Sokolov: Is that really what you had to write?

01-00:41:25 Mather: Yeah, totally. We were laughing at it the whole time, and it was just another place—oh, we're in detention together. [laughing] It was like another party. We just capped on it, and it was just hilarious. It was a little bit of a drag, but we bonded. We were childish and, at the same time, rebellious. And that seemed to feel good. It seemed to feel good, because I think there was a lot of us pushed at from a lot of directions at that age. I mean really. And then right around the corner, of course, is the real world, you know? Yeah.

01-00:42:10 Berglund Sokolov: So high school, for you, you didn't quite make it to the end?

01-00:42:16 Mather: Oh, I went all the way through, but I didn't graduate. I went all four years, but I just didn't graduate. I didn't have enough units.

01-00:42:25 Berglund Sokolov: Did you make a decision to drop out, or did you just make a decision not to finish everything up?

01-00:42:33 Mather: Well, I finished all my classes. I just didn't pass them all, and so I didn't have enough units to walk, to graduate. Two weeks after the graduation that I didn't attend I got a GED.

01-00:42:48 Berglund Sokolov: Okay.

01-00:42:49 Mather: There was no real point in me trying to go back to school for two classes, or something.

01-00:42:56 Berglund Sokolov: Was that a decision that you kind of made, deciding that you would do the GED, or did you have a counselor, or someone?

01-00:43:03 Mather: My mother insisted I do it, since school was out. [laughing] "You're going to do that." So I did. The only reason I didn't graduate is because I didn't give a shit, okay? I just really didn't.

01-00:43:19 Berglund Sokolov: How come you didn't give a shit?

01-00:43:20 Mather: Well, all my friends didn't give a shit. A lot of my friends were pretty good students, just naturally. I think I have a learning disability, or something. Spelling's very, very difficult for me. I can tell if it's right or wrong, but I couldn't tell you how to spell it; [let's] put it that way. I don't know about all that—everybody's got something. But I think school was difficult for me. I did remedial reading classes and basic math, and kind of going that direction to try to get through. At the same time, I was involved with sports, until I got thrown off the gymnastics team for smoking. You can see the pattern, if you will. They were small things, but it was obvious that they didn't really jive with the authorities or the things that are acceptable.

01-00:44:28 Berglund Sokolov: When you left high school, or when high school ended and you didn't graduate, right?

01-00:44:34 Mather: Sure.

01-00:44:35 Berglund Sokolov: What did the future look like to you? What were you thinking was awaiting you out there in the world that you were about to enter?

01-00:44:47 Mather: Well, I was working for my father. He had a gas station in Pacifica, a Richfield station, so I worked there. I worked there my last year in high school too, and I worked there for a while after. I bought a motorcycle, and I had a Corvair, so I had a car and a motorcycle and a job—and a girlfriend. And then my girlfriend went to University of Oahu. [laughing] Which broke my heart, that's for sure. And then things changed. My friends started going to college or to Vietnam. Some were coming back already from Vietnam.

01-00:45:41 Berglund Sokolov: What year was this that you ended high school?

01-00:45:44 Mather: '66.

01-00:45:45 Berglund Sokolov: '66, okay.

01-00:45:46 Mather: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost 300,000 Americans in Vietnam in '66. It was kind of not on my radar. I knew it was going on, but I had no idea what was going on. You'd see a little bit, and then started seeing it in the news, and you know you don't want to go. You know; your parents know. They don't want you to go. It was all like that. But you kind of avoid it.

01-00:46:18 Berglund Sokolov: There wasn't any pressure in your family for you to go serve your country, or a particular kind of patriotism?

01-00:46:25 Mather: I don't think there was. My mother, and especially my grandfather, abhorred it and what it does to people. My grandfather, when he was approached about going into the military during the Second World War—because he had a family, he had all these kids—but he was pushed by the KKK and by some of the powers-that-be in his local draft board, and he just walked in and told them, "I'd rather die and go to hell, so you do what you wish." He walked out and they didn't draft him. It was kind of like I walked around with that history.

01-00:47:09 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

01-00:47:11 Mather: But not really when I was young—a little bit older—before I was drafted I think I knew this stuff.

01-00:47:22 Berglund Sokolov: Kind of in the back of your mind?

01-00:47:23 Mather: Yeah, yeah. I had given up the violent aspects of my youth, as far as street fighting and things like that, long before I got drafted. I was done with it. I was taking LSD. I was going to the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom and the Matrix and California Hall and doing nothing else on the weekends, except basically doing that. And sometimes during the week, and sometimes after hours too. [siren blares in the background]. It's noon on a Tuesday.

01-00:48:04 Berglund Sokolov: Yes, in San Francisco—the siren going off.

01-00:48:08 Farrell: Oh, right now? Oh.

01-00:48:09 Berglund Sokolov: [laughing] Yeah.

01-00:48:10 Mather: Now we have to understand what language they're going to make the announcement in. Okay, if we could take a break here. The deal is that they need to do it in three languages, and they don't.

01-00:48:21 Berglund Sokolov: I didn't know that.

01-00:48:24 Mather: English, Spanish, and Chinese. In Chinatown it's in Chinese. In the Mission it's in English. [laughing] So that's kind of funny. Yeah, I know, it's strange.

01-00:48:37 Berglund Sokolov: I didn't know that. I never heard the words. I grew up here, right?

01-00:48:41 Mather: This was a real test.

01-00:48:45 Berglund Sokolov: I love that we have the noontime siren dueling with the foghorns, right?

Farrell: I know, yeah.

01-00:48:50 Berglund Sokolov: We know where we are.

01-00:48:51 Mather: They're testing the emergency network, and that's really all they're doing every Tuesday.

01-00:48:58 Berglund Sokolov: So you were kind of living kind of a—I don't know, it sounds a little footloose life—working, partying, seeing music, kind of after high school in between what comes next.

01-00:49:15 Mather: [sounds of assent] Right.

01-00:49:16 Berglund Sokolov: Was being drafted on your mind?

01-00:49:18 Mather: Oh yeah. Absolutely. [laughing] A lot of people I knew were struggling with it. I took off with a friend and we got a driveaway from LA to New York.

01-00:49:37 Berglund Sokolov: Explain what a driveaway is, in case people [don't know].

01-00:49:38 Mather: You'd just drive people's cars across the country for them, and maybe they give you a little money for gas, or something. But you get to take their car and you get to ride, and it's not a bad deal. We took one of those. It ended abruptly when I rear-ended some people in Northridge, Ohio, and that's as far as we got. I had to pay the fine before I could leave the town—fifty bucks. [laughing] But anyway, we were on our way to Canada. We were going to go check it out, so we got to Buffalo, took a bus, went to Toronto, Yonge Street, went to the village, looked around, found some really inexpensive, crappy LSD—or expensive, crappy LSD I should say, and we kind of looked around for the meanings of the laughter. I was very unsophisticated at that point in time. I was more interested in looking for girlfriends and drugs and just looking around—I don't know what I was doing, really. But I was making an effort to figure it out.

01-00:50:49 Berglund Sokolov: Was the idea of going to Canada to check it out to kind of thing well, if things, if it—?

01-00:50:53 Mather: Yeah, what's next.

01-00:50:54 Berglund Sokolov: If it comes to it, at least I've been there?

01-00:50:57 Mather: Yeah, evaluation without condemnation is not a good policy, you know? Or (condemnation without evaluation), that's not good. I figured we'd check it

out. He wanted to check it out; I wanted to check it out. So we got there— didn't find nothing. We could have, probably, but we didn't.

It came time when the money was running out, and he got on an airplane and went home—and I was in Toronto. [laughing] Okay. I will hitchhike. I stuck out my thumb and got a ride—two rides. The second ride I got from a guy in a van, and he had a couple of girls in the back, women—and we drove from—they had just gone to the World's Fair I guess it is, in Toronto, in '67- '68. We drove to Chicago, actually, to Chicago, dropped the two ladies off. Mary was one of the names, that's all I do remember. He was a merchant seaman, and he thought: Well, I'll go to New Orleans and see if I can get on a boat. If I do get on a boat, you take the van back to Oakland for me. I said, "Sure, no problem." You know, we were picking up hitchhikers, and begging for money for gas, and getting where we're going. He didn't get a boat, so we headed off. We went through Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, New Orleans for a little while, but the amazing thing is I put out my thumb, and in the second ride I got a ride all the way to my front door from outside Toronto, by way of going all the way south and coming back through the states. Pretty amazing—and three days before I was drafted I got home.

01-00:52:51 Berglund Sokolov: Tell us about the day you were drafted.

01-00:52:56 Mather: I was dropped off by my father at the San Mateo—it was a meeting place, and I think it was the Selective Service—or whatever—office.

01-00:53:10 Berglund Sokolov: How did you find out you were drafted?

01-00:53:12 Mather: Draft notice.

01-00:53:13 Berglund Sokolov: Like how did the notice come?

01-00:53:13 Mather: Draft notice in the mail. Yeah, greetings.

01-00:53:17 Berglund Sokolov: Were you expecting it?

01-00:53:20 Mather: Well, I knew it was inevitable. I had a deferment. I had a 1-Y deferment, based on the fact that I had had a head injury in a fight at a Catholic school dance. I got hit in the head with a folding chair, and took a nap. They were doing EEGs and stuff. When I went to the doctor, toward my last checkup for this stuff, for the deferment—I saw his letter later in life—but this not only described my physical condition, but the length of my hair and my attire. Yeah. And I received a draft notice. I was drafted September 17, 1967.

01-00:54:22 Berglund Sokolov: How long was your hair and what was your attire like at that point?

01-00:54:27 Mather: I had wide wale corduroy bell-bottoms on, leather vest, you know—my hair wasn't that long, but longer than—

01-00:54:38 Berglund Sokolov: It wasn't a crew cut.

01-00:54:39 Mather: It didn't have to [be] very long to be long.

01-00:54:41 Berglund Sokolov: It wasn't a crew cut.

01-00:54:41 Mather: No, no. Not even close. I may even have had a little five o'clock shadow, who knows. So that was the way that was. But the day I was drafted my father dropped me off in my own car, and he said, "Take good care of yourself." I went in and got on a bus, and they drove us to SFO. My first airplane trip was to Seattle, Washington, to get off, take another bus ride down to Tacoma to Fort Lewis.

01-00:55:21 Berglund Sokolov: Before we go into the Fort Lewis story, I'm curious—how did your mom react to you being drafted?

01-00:55:28 Mather: Sure. I don't really know how she reacted. I know she was trying to be supportive of me and not trying to let her worry affect me. I think she was just hopeful that I'd be okay. I'm sure she was not happy that I was having to go, because she didn't believe in it at all. It was just the worst thing you could do to her, take her son away from her, I think. Many of us can relate to that. I couldn't imagine it, to tell you the truth.

01-00:56:00 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah. Did you have, at the point of being drafted, any feelings about the war in Vietnam? Any kind of political outlook that was guiding those feelings? Or was it more a self-preservation, kind of "I don't want to go because I don't want to go"?

01-00:56:25 Mather: Well, I think it was two or three fold. In the environment that I was in, I was listening to all this wonderful music of the day. I was very fortunate to even be there.

01-00:56:41 Berglund Sokolov: The emerging counterculture.

01-00:56:43 Mather: Right, very fortunate to even be a part of that. The information I was gathering was about love, about peace, about understanding, about cooperation, about sharing, about being open, being friendly, being kind— this is kind of what I was feeling on a daily basis. When you stay up all weekend and take three to five hits of acid over that period of time, for months on end, you kind of get to a place where you don't want to fight with anybody. You kind of see through a lot of stuff. I'm no big head, as they used to call us, you know, but I picked up something. This kid figured it out, that this is not okay. Even being harsh, like I walked out of the Avalon Ballroom one night and there was this guy, the same guy that hit [the sailor] with the crescent wrench—the same guy. Anyway, he was standing outside, all of us glowing, you know, after our evening on LSD. There was a young girl that I remember from high school out in front, and she was saying merry Christmas, or something like that. It was very sweet. He started capping on her, and I started to realize oh, this insensitivity, this meanness of high school. It's like the guy who teased the girl with the scars, that kind of stuff. I started to make separations and understanding who I really was, rather than who I was trying to be for somebody else.

01-00:58:26 Berglund Sokolov: It sounds like you're saying the drug scene and the counterculture, the music from that, the opening and perspective that that was giving you, that you were not the same kid who left high school just a year or two before.

01-00:58:48 Mather: Sure, absolutely, yeah. You go through that many things quickly, you shift. We were all shifting; we were all changing. My whole generation was going through it, no matter where they lived. But this was a hotbed, and it was easy. I mean, not easy, but it was happening. It just was happening. You'd walk down the street, and you could look in the eyes of people your age and you could all relate—and there were so many of us. Look at the Boomers now—there were so many of us. We were dominant, in a lot of ways. Good memories, good memories. I don't have any bad ones about those times, other than a couple acid trips. [laughing]

01-00:59:49 Berglund Sokolov: Let's go back from Haight Street, and let's go to Fort Lewis.

01-00:59:53 Mather: Sure. Okay. I was kind of trying to avoid that, but yeah, sure. [everyone laughs]

01-01:00:01 Berglund Sokolov: So you got drafted in 1967, at nineteen?

01-01:00:06 Mather: Yeah.

01-01:00:06 Berglund Sokolov: Turning twenty.

01-01:00:09 Mather: Yeah.

01-01:00:09 Berglund Sokolov: And you hit basic training in Fort Lewis, which is north of Seattle?

01-01:00:13 Mather: Yeah, sure.

01-01:00:15 Berglund Sokolov: Can you share some memories, first impressions of what that was like?

01-01:00:20 Mather: Yeah. Fort Lewis is an old fort, like here—not quite as old, I don't think. But these barracks hadn't been used since the First World War. They'd been around since the First World War. They all had coal-fired boilers to heat them, that needed to be fired twenty-four hours a day, and you had roles, like that. Not only did you have to do that, but you also had to be on fire watch. Every building here, every building in this post, at one time or another, had a soldier awake twenty-four hours a day. They'd usually relieve each other throughout the evening for fire watch, prior to smoke detectors, okay? That was things that went on, okay, during the evenings there. There was a little disruption, a little bit, all night—plus you're being sleep-deprived anyway— and they're yelling at you. They don't talk to you. The wake-up was a garbage can rolling down the middle of the aisle. That was your alarm clock.

01-01:01:26 Berglund Sokolov: A metal can.

01-01:01:26 Mather: A big metal can, they'd just roll it down the aisle, and they'd start screaming and jerking blankets off of people. That's pretty systematic. But that was expected after a little while. It would get more and more outrageous. Like one time we had to take all the bunks, all the mattresses, all our footlockers, every single thing inside the building out of the building, and we couldn't use the doors. [laughing] And [we had to] put it out in the quadrangle just like it is in here. You've got this much time—and we did it. They train you like that, to do the impossible, but you do it. You leap through that and that's an interesting part of their training, I think.

01-01:02:22 Berglund Sokolov: How did you respond to basic? What was your response to the experience? How did you feel about it?

01-01:02:32 Mather: Well, because it was very physical, you were doing a lot of exercise. You were running [and] if you'd screwed up at all you were doing pushups,

period. I was doing hundreds of pushups every day. Luckily, I was kind of fit when I went in, but I was even fitter when I came out—probably the fittest I've ever been. Basic was just harsh, but it became a game. You know, it was so harsh it became a game. You had to like just kind of like snap to and do the stuff so you weren't in trouble, and once you figure that out you just go, oh, all I've got to do is this, right? Yeah, that's all I've got to do, okay. We'd go to bayonet training, strike the dummy with the butt of your rifle and slash with the bayonet—and then thrust. They used to say, "What's the spirit of the bayonet?" "To kill." And I used to say, "The pill," or whatever; you figure out ways to defuse it. I'd go to the rifle range, and they want you to sight in everything and then qualify, and I would shoot at other people's targets and qualify them. But then they always made me go back out and qualify. One day I spent like six hours there, firing every single thing to qualify because, "You're going."

01-01:03:58 Berglund Sokolov: So you were kind of monkey-wrenching things when you were there, a little bit?

01-01:04:01 Mather: Yeah, I was. I was certainly dragging my feet. Absolutely.

01-01:04:06 Berglund Sokolov: What about moving into your more extensive individual training?

01-01:04:15 Mather: Well, once I got out of basic, and I got to the military occupational skill school of infantry, which I had just done—eight weeks of it—I didn't see there was going to be a lot more to do. I already was going, "Oh, this is not good. But I'm here. I'd better get really good at this. If I'm going to go to the war, I'd better be really good." I just flipped. I just kind of flipped.

01-01:04:48 Berglund Sokolov: That was a survival strategy?

01-01:04:48 Mather: Absolutely. As time went on, because I had—I missed a spot—because I had gone home after—I think it was I get drafted in September [or] November— I went home in December for Christmas leave, right? I came back late, three days late, with an earring and a knitted tie, and my brass was all gone. I gave it away at a party. I had black socks on with the little red crest on the heel, you know.

01-01:05:34 Berglund Sokolov: What delayed your arrival?

01-01:05:37 Mather: I didn't want to go back. There was things I wanted to do. [laughing] I didn't know how else to do it, so I went back late so that would get me in trouble, maybe get me recycled—maybe something would change. Anyway, went

back late. I was on the aircraft, and I think I indulged in some stuff, I don't know what exactly, and I was kind of semiconscious when we landed. They had me taken off the aircraft by a couple of MPs this time. [laughing] They took me into a clinic and rammed a hose up my nose. It made my nose bleed. They were trying to pump my stomach. "Well, you're an amateur. Get the fuck away from me." And then they took me back to my unit, right.

01-01:06:37 Berglund Sokolov: They thought that you were having some kind of an overdose or something?

01-01:06:39 Mather: Yeah exactly, exactly. But I was just kind of sleepy, and I did take some sedatives, but I wasn't [overdosing].

01-01:06:49 Berglund Sokolov: Did they actually pump your stomach, or did they just try?

01-01:06:51 Mather: I think they just broke some blood capillaries is what they ended up doing more than anything. I fought them, actually. Yeah, I fought them. That was the whole thing. [laughing] They took me back to my training unit and they said, "Okay, well, you've missed your recycle date, so we're going to have to put you in this other company." I said okay, so I stayed in this detachment for a day or two, and then they shipped me over. It hadn't really started yet, so I was there a day or two early, and so they were issuing all the clothing. They issued me combat boots for Vietnam, the nylon boots. That was the first time I had ever been issued those. I figured there was a reason, you know? They give me some of the ripstop nylon pants, and you're going, "Oh, this is not good."

So I started plotting: I've got to get out of here. They're going to take me. I'm going to go if I don't do something. There was a lot of people getting sick, a lot of illness in the military, a lot of people living around each other. One day there was a bunk empty, and I went, "Oh." AWOL, we found out at roll call. AWOL. Okay, this one we're dropping for desertion. I'm going, "Hmm, okay." I said, "Look, I've got to get out of here." I took my civilian clothes and put them on under my uniform and went on sick call. They put a helmet liner on you and they give you a mask, and you get on the bus and you go to the hospital. Got to the hospital, got off the bus, went into the hospital, turned around and walked out of the hospital with the mask off and the helmet liner in my hand, walked into a phone booth, took my name tag off my uniform, dropped it on the ground, except for my boots, and called a cab—not necessarily in that order. Waited for the cab, got into the cab and got the Greyhound from Seattle to San Francisco, to Sixth Street.

As we were coming down toward Tacoma, this bus that I'm on to get away from the Army, takes the off-ramp into the base. [laughing] To the bus stop, right? To the bus terminal. Oh my God. What's going on? I was just cold,

[and had the] chills. It was unbelievable. Oh, just oh no. I went into the bathroom in the back of the bus, after they had pulled in, and hung out there and just waited. I heard the bus engine start again, right, and just as that happened, this smartass guy that I was sitting next to or across from went, [knocking] "I know you're in there," on the door of the bathroom and just about gave me a heart attack. But I survived that, and we laughed about it— and I did get home.

01-01:10:26 Berglund Sokolov: About how long, from when you went back to Fort Lewis after Christmas to when you left via Greyhound Bus, were you back there?

01-01:10:39 Mather: What was the last part? What was that?

01-01:10:41 Berglund Sokolov: About how long were you up at Fort Lewis between Christmas, when you came back after Christmas three days late and when you left?

01-01:10:49 Mather: Yeah, because of my recycle, I'm thinking it was about two weeks, three weeks. I'm trying to remember exactly, because I didn't stick around long. I came back from that Christmas leave, got put into this company, and things were starting to heat up toward the rotation. I'd sit out—there was another unit. They were going out, and they were calling out their destinations, where they were headed, and Tan Son Nhut Airport was among them, okay? I could see all these guys with Vietnam orders, Korea orders, and I just went, "Oh, this is getting real." I had to make a choice, and so that's what I did. I had to make a choice. And yeah, I think it was okay.

01-01:11:57 Berglund Sokolov: Do you have any idea how soon after you left your detachment was deployed?

01-01:12:03 Mather: It would have been, probably, twelve to twenty weeks later. They would have had a thirty-day leave, plus finish their training. Maybe they'd be stationed somewhere else for a little while, but everybody was earmarked for Vietnam then.

01-01:12:15 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

01-01:12:16 Mather: Everybody. It didn't matter. It was so tight they wouldn't let you off-base during your graduation at basic. They wouldn't let you off, you know? Yeah, that was interesting. A friend of my mother's came up to see me, for her, Frank Cannelli and they wouldn't let him take me off the base, for a meal even.

01-01:12:45 Berglund Sokolov: So they were worried about all of these AWOLs?

01-01:12:47 Mather: Well, they were losing people; they were losing people left and right.

01-01:12:48 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

01-01:12:49 Mather: Yeah.

01-01:12:50 Berglund Sokolov: What happens when you get to Sixth and Market, you get home? You're basically AWOL in San Francisco?

01-01:13:00 Mather: Yeah, well, I went home. Yeah, I went home to San Bruno.

01-01:13:03 Berglund Sokolov: To San Bruno.

01-01:13:04 Mather: Yeah, I went home and checked in with home, and it was okay for a while, quite a while—actually months. Not a big deal. Friends noticed I was home and things like that. I would search out my friends and try to figure it out. Eventually I started to get a little paranoid that the FBI would come around, and they did. It was never really safe for me to be home, so I'd go there for short periods of time and mostly stay with my friends, couch surf. That got old. My paranoia kind of creeped in [and] the drugs didn't help any, I don't think, at that point.

01-01:13:48 Berglund Sokolov: Did you feel like you were doing a lot of drugs at that period?

01-01:13:49 Mather: I wasn't doing that much, but I was doing enough. Certainly not on a daily basis, or anything like that, but certainly weekly. But not always psychedelics, you know? It was just what it was. That's what was going on. I was in Montara, not too far from where I used to live, at a nice apartment overlooking the ocean. I was staying there, and we were all high together and talking, and I just came to a conclusion, boom. This isn't working. This running around, hiding, isn't working, not good for this, you know? I decided that I have to do something, so that's when I started talking to my mom about what's going on with me, a little bit, and just shared with her. She was concerned, so she responded, interestingly enough, by looking in the Yellow Pages and finding the listing for the War Resisters League and giving me the phone number and address. That took me to the War Resisters League up in the Haight, where I met Randy Kehler. Key guy, Randy Kehler. Preliminary story, but Randy Kehler and I met, along with Jack Robinson, the Marine,

who was in the Nine for Peace. We all kind of gathered, and there were different churches that were helping different guys.

01-01:15:26 Berglund Sokolov: Was the War Resisters League, at this point, becoming a focal point for anti- war efforts, draft resisters, or AWOLs/deserters?

01-01:15:39 Mather: Yeah, as things were progressing, as things were going, there's the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, there was the War Resisters League, there's other organizations, but these were the two primary organizations that I think were influential at that point in time, other than, I would say, The Resistance, in San Francisco, which was a sundry group of people. The Clergy and Laity Against the War, the San Francisco Lawyers Guild—there were lots of different organizations that were coming together.

01-01:16:14 Berglund Sokolov: Which churches were involved?

01-01:16:16 Mather: Oh, the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Episcopalian Church, the Methodist Church. I'm not sure of all of them, but the Clergy and Laity— I was chained, at one point, to a Methodist minister, and I was also chained to a Presbyterian minister, and I was chained to a Catholic priest also during that period of time.

01-01:16:38 Berglund Sokolov: That was during the Nine for Peace?

01-01:16:39 Mather: Yeah, right.

01-01:16:39 Berglund Sokolov: Let's back up a little bit.

01-01:16:41 Mather: Sure.

01-01:16:42 Berglund Sokolov: So your mom gave you the phone number for the War Resisters League in the Lower Haight. How did your dad react to you being back, under the circumstances?

01-01:16:54 Mather: He was worried. Worried I was going to get in a lot of trouble. He had these other boys at home—not that he wanted me to set a certain example, but he didn't know how this was going to go. He was worried about me. He cared, and would go, "Damn it. Can't you just be a truck driver?" You know, one thing he did say. I said, "Well, yeah, I could probably work that out

somehow, but then I'd just still be helping them do what they're doing, so I'm not going to do that."

01-01:17:24 Berglund Sokolov: At that point you were feeling like not only was there a self-preservation mode, but you didn't want to be complicit in the war effort?

01-01:17:32 Mather: Yeah, well, there was no Canada in the picture at that point, no other alternative other than you're drafted, you're in the Army. You either go to war or go to jail. It's pretty simple. I hadn't really considered, seriously, leaving anymore. It became something I thought about all the time.

01-01:18:00 Berglund Sokolov: Did you have any run-ins with the law during this period, when you were initially—?

01-01:18:05 Mather: AWOL?

01-01:18:05 Berglund Sokolov: —AWOL, yeah.

01-01:18:06 Mather: No. No. No, I kept a low profile.

01-01:18:13 Berglund Sokolov: You were involved with a group that we've referred to a couple of times now as the Nine, or the Nine for Peace.

01-01:18:20 Mather: The Nine for Peace.

01-01:18:20 Berglund Sokolov: Talk a little bit about how that came together, if you remember.

01-01:18:25 Mather: Sure, sure I do. Again, Randy Kehler, the head of the WRL during that period of time—it was kind of a central clearinghouse. The different groups and agencies would, if they had an AWOL that just came in, they'd put him in touch with other people. There were people putting us up, there were people taking care of us, feeding us, giving us counsel, helping us with money sometimes, a phone, just be able to make a phone [call] and caution us not to tell people where we were, and so forth, and so on. So there was a lot of movement around it.

01-01:19:17 Berglund Sokolov: And the War Resisters League was in the Lower Haight were there, when you were in the Lower Haight as someone who was recently AWOL, absent without leave?

01-01:19:22 Mather: Mm-hmm. I believe. Sure.

01-01:19:30 Berglund Sokolov: Were you seeing a lot of other people like you there?

01-01:19:34 Mather: Yeah, yeah.

01-01:19:35 Berglund Sokolov: Or that you could identify as—he looks like—?

01-01:19:39 Mather: Yeah, sure. There were so many people walking down Haight Street, with short hair, it was not funny, okay? In combat boots. It was just really blatant. That's why there were so many coming into this post at the time.

01-01:19:56 Berglund Sokolov: People were, as disaffected young soldiers or resisters—

01-01:20:00 Mather: Well, yeah—for whatever reason.

01-01:20:01 Berglund Sokolov: They were being drawn to the countercultural scene that was emerging.

01-01:20:05 Mather: The Bay Area.

01-01:20:05 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

01-01:20:06 Mather: They go AWOL; they come here. They get arrested for whatever, and they take them up to the Special Processing Detachment in Fort Scott, just above the stockade, closer to the bridge there, and they'd process them there. Either back to duty, or their unit, or the stockade, or they hold them there for a little longer, or whatever. So yeah, there were a lot of people coming in, and that's why the jail was so full—very simple.

01-01:20:33 Berglund Sokolov: Right. I think we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, but it's a good foreshadowing.

01-01:20:36 Mather: Tell me when.

01-01:20:38 Berglund Sokolov: Let's go back to the Nine, the Nine for Peace.

01-01:20:48 Mather: Okay. Yeah, it started slow.

01-01:20:49 Berglund Sokolov: Let me ask you one thing before we get there.

01-01:20:51 Mather: Okay.

01-01:20:53 Berglund Sokolov: So you're in the Haight, War Resisters League, you're seeing other people in their combat boots with short hair. Why would they leave their combat boots on?

01-01:21:04 Mather: They didn't have anything else, number one. Maybe they'd go to the Goodwill store or something, but it was stylistic to wear combat boots then.

01-01:21:13 Berglund Sokolov: Right, or an Army jacket?

01-01:21:14 Mather: Yeah, exactly. So it kind of worked. But the Nine came about through efforts by the Howard Presbyterian Church, the War Resisters League, and all the other organizations in the city, to gather, put together AWOLs that were thinking of doing something more than just going back and talking about that, talking about what the likelihood of that was and the process of that was. And would we have attorneys? Would there be support?

The things were building up to the time that we did our press conference, and we arrived on camera, many of us, went into the Howard Presbyterian Street on Oak—I think it's Lyon. I'm probably wrong here. [Oak and Baker] But anyway, and it was nice and warm, and we had all these ministers around us. We were chained then to one of them—just to prevent us from being snatched away easily, and also symbolic of the bonds of man, of humanity.

Jack Robinson was a Marine. I met him early on. We actually roomed together in the city for a while. I remember the day we went into WRL, they asked us if we would paint a room. We said sure. He gave us a few bucks, and we went out and bought some bread, some mustard, and some bologna. I'll never forget that.

And just slowly meeting other guys, meeting somebody from the Navy— Dale Herrin, [Steve] "Sunny" Anderson from the Army, all these guys. Sooner or later there was eight of us. We were in this church and we held a press conference. And then, a day later, an Air Force sergeant showed up; Oliver Hirsch showed up. That meant we represented the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps—four branches of the military were demonstrating against the war and refusing to go. We felt it was pretty powerful at the time, in 1968. And it got some press—it got a lot of press. [laughing]

01-01:23:51 Berglund Sokolov: What month did this happen, Keith?

01-01:23:52 Mather: July. It happened on the fourteenth through the seventeenth of July, fifty years ago. And so we went into sanctuary. There was a press release.

01-01:24:09 Berglund Sokolov: And press coverage.

01-01:24:13 Mather: And press coverage, yeah. They came in, there was a press conference inside the church. It's all available. I'm asked, do I understand the ramifications of this? And I answer, "Yeah, I do." They asked me how old I was, and I told them I was twenty-one. They asked to see my chains, and they asked some other questions of some other people—but they were on me because I was the local boy. Because of that, I feel like the Army—because of the local— the Army really took it to me a little bit harder than they did people who weren't, because it was like here, and it was like—they've got to live with it, all right? That's the way I feel about it, anyway. I have no doubt about it.

01-01:25:03 Berglund Sokolov: When you decided to take part in this action, that's pretty dramatic, right? To sit in a church chained to clergy and have the press come, and make a statement about—right, be public like that when you'd been in hiding before. What was the outcome that you were hoping for?

01-01:25:26 Mather: Well, outcome wasn't so much important at that time. It was that we were all hurting around being AWOL, you know? It just doesn't really work, unless you leave the country. It's just too hard on you. There was no solution in it. I felt, personally, and I think a lot of the other guys felt the same way, we knew we were going back to the Army or Navy or Marines or the Air Force, but we didn't want to and we were probably going to jail. If we were going to jail, we may as well do something to try to help stop this goddamn war, because that's the reason they're trying to draft us, and that's the reason we're where we are and are feeling the way we are, so we've got to do that. And so we did. We came out and said, "Whatever you're going to do to us, you're going to do to us anyway, but we're going to speak our piece in public and shame you and let you make a response."

01-01:26:37 Berglund Sokolov: Can you talk a little bit about the role of Reverend Farnham in all of this?

01-01:26:43 Mather: Phil Farnham was the minister of the Presbyterian church—Howard Presbyterian Church—and he was a really bright guy. I think he had been and was later a union organizer, so he had a lot of skills like that. He really wrapped his arms, and his whole parish or congregation did as well, just

amazing, hundreds of people coming in and bringing in food and helping us and congratulating us on what we're doing.

01-01:27:19 Berglund Sokolov: You said you went into sanctuary, but it sounds like it actually probably was kind of sanctuary after being in hiding?

01-01:27:27 Mather: Oh totally, oh yeah.

01-01:27:30 Berglund Sokolov: And that kind of head space?

01-01:27:30 Mather: We were open to the world, and we were in a safe place. When that happened—it hadn't happened in a while, okay? And we're scared. [laughing] Needless to say, we were scared. But having a minister to counsel us, next to us—and they were also scared. It was good, so we were able to talk.

01-01:27:53 Berglund Sokolov: Were they young as well?

01-01:27:53 Mather: Oh yeah, sure. Tony Nugent was maybe a couple more years, maybe three or four years older than me. They actually arrested him too. They thought he was one of us, and then released him later. [laughing] But yeah, you know, it's like those days were just made of that kind of event and that kind of feeling, that emotion. We were riveting, I think, for the news media, because at the time, not much was happening out here. [Ronald] Lockman had done his, there were other sanctuaries, and so forth and so on. There were other people doing things that hadn't done things before or after.

01-01:28:39 Berglund Sokolov: You were aware of that at the time?

01-01:28:42 Mather: We were made aware of it. We were made aware of what had been going on, and then what this was coming into, so to speak. We had a general idea of what we were trying to do at the same time this has not been done before.

01-01:29:00 Berglund Sokolov: Could you say that the Nine for Peace experience kind of politicized you in a way? Like gave you a deeper political understanding of your actions that might have been more individually motivated before that?

01-01:29:20 Mather: I think they were instinctually political. I don't think any of us were so sophisticated that we would be able to say it was purely political.

01-01:29:32 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

01-01:29:34 Mather: I think it was emotional; I think it was visceral. I think it comes from your core. You reach a point where you don't have a choice anymore—or you do, but you've got several, but you've got to make the right one, you know? You really do. What good is you going to jail if it's not going to do any good? You're just going to go to jail. If you do something, it might do some good. You're still going to jail. You may go for a little longer, but you've done some good, so it was an easy bargain to strike. I watched Jack Robinson's fast for twenty-eight days. I didn't watch him, but I knew that happened, and he had kidney damage—all these things went on.

01-01:30:21 Berglund Sokolov: Did he do that before the Nine for Peace, or after?

01-01:30:23 Mather: No, after. On Treasure Island he fasted for twenty-eight days—Parris Island jail. So yeah. The Nine for Peace became, for me, a seminal type of experience here.

01-01:30:44 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

01-01:30:45 Mather: And then having it bring me into the stockade after our arrest. But I thought that the arrest was the best part, actually, of that whole Nine for Peace thing, to tell you the truth. When can you get all four branches of the service lined up behind their service members at a communion table, on camera, where they drag your ass away, cut your chains, and throw you into a paddy wagon? It's kind of like what are you doing to those poor boys, you know, kind of thing, right? And it worked. It worked.

01-01:31:24 Berglund Sokolov: Can you talk a little bit about the other eight who were with you? You've mentioned that there were the four branches—all four branches of the military—but anything else you want to say about any of the guys who were with you?

01-01:31:38 Mather: Well, this is the way it was. I knew them maybe two or three times before the event. We sat with each other for those three days, and when we were arrested five us went to the stockade, two went to the Navy, one went to the Air Force, and one went to the Marines.

01-01:31:57 Berglund Sokolov: So the Nine for Peace event, the sit-in for the Nine for Peace was a three- day-long event?

01-01:32:03 Mather: Yeah, yeah it was three days of sanctuary, yeah.

01-01:32:07 Berglund Sokolov: Okay.

01-01:32:08 Mather: I knew Chuck Jones and Sunny Anderson—I'm trying to remember the other names right now. I'm not going to be able to. But, we got to know each other a little bit in the stockade. We were all doing our own thing, trying to get through, waiting for our trials. All of them, except for Sunny, I think, got a pretrial agreement of like two years. That way they'd sign off, be out in a year, year and a half, or something and they get on with it, right? But they never offered me one, right? [laughing]

01-01:32:56 Berglund Sokolov: They brought you here to the stockade. Where did they bring the others?

01-01:33:01 Mather: Well, five Army guys came here. Treasure Island took the Marine and the Navy guys, and the Air Force—I think they sent him to one of the, Mather or one of the other Air Force bases, I'm not sure. But he didn't stay there long. He got out right away. He got out in weeks—they kicked him out.

01-01:33:26 Berglund Sokolov: When you were meeting people in the Haight, either on the street, through the War Resisters League and then really ultimately in the Nine for Peace, what did it mean to start coming into contact with people who were going through the same thing that you were going through?

01-01:33:49 Mather: Yeah, meeting people that had been AWOL for a while—

01-01:33:53 Berglund Sokolov: Right, that's a big difference from you jumping on a bus in Fort Lewis, right?

01-01:33:59 Mather: Yeah, yeah, I became a little more hip to what was going on among the AWOLs. It was like, "Well, okay. Where did you AWOL from? How long have you been gone?" I could tell where they were at based on that. Some guys were still just really talking a lot and nothing was coming out—you know, they were just not knowing what to do. With these guys, they had already gone through their preliminary evaluation for this kind of an action. They had been spoken to. Dale—the Navy guys were really quite astute, as was Oliver. It helped to think that we all were, but they were pretty good. Jack Robinson was just—he was so angry, not funny. Once we got together, and once we got separated, we tried to keep in touch through the ministers, and did for a while. But after a while, it was obvious it was going to be kind of painstaking. We'd hear about if people were okay, where they were, where they went, how much time they got. Things like that.

01-01:35:16 Berglund Sokolov: What did it mean for you, I guess both then and now, to be part of the Nine for Peace?

01-01:35:24 Mather: It was huge. I'll be honest with you. It set me free, you know what I mean? It did. It really set me free. It was like, I don't have to listen to them anymore. I've got my own message, you know?

01-01:35:40 Berglund Sokolov: You mean you don't have to listen to the—?

01-01:35:43 Mather: The Army. I don't listen to the Army, the politicians—I don't have to listen to any of that crap anymore because I have my own message. I'm not playing your game. I may have to go to your jail and eat your food, or whatever. But it was like—in my mind—I was scared to death, okay? Absolutely, positively scared to death about what was going to happen, and second- guessed myself several times, probably. But in the final analysis, it was a clear path it felt to me. Once I had made the decision, that was it.

The way I made this decision—I told you about that AWOL when I went home, and I was home during Christmas—when I was home for two weeks. It was great. I was in a room, a bedroom with a Persian rug and pillows on the floor and music and silly lights and stuff. But I was, again, once again imbibing in my spiritual ingredients, and I realized then that the only way that I could continue, whatever I did, I had to decide not to go to Vietnam. All of a sudden I came to that decision, and once I came to that decision, the stress left. When I was going through these other things, they were just part of a further exercise of that.

01-01:37:23 Berglund Sokolov: Of not going to Vietnam.

01-01:37:24 Mather: Of not going, and I already had made that decision and now we're going to embrace whatever comes. We kind of have to, because I'm not going that way. That was my feeling, at the time anyway, that somehow—oh, that went away. How did that happen, you know, really. I think about that.

01-01:37:47 Berglund Sokolov: At that point it sounds like you had a moral, a humanitarian, a deeper conviction about not going to Vietnam?

01-01:38:01 Mather: I think it was for me. Yeah, I think all that's true, but I think as well I just made a personal decision that I couldn't avoid. I'd look at it and look at it and look at it. When I came to that conclusion, when I came to that realization that I just wouldn't go, and that was the simplest thing, right? It made a lot of sense. But I made a decision internally.

01-01:38:30 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, and that freed you.

01-01:38:32 Mather: Yeah.

01-01:38:32 Berglund Sokolov: Tell us a little bit about what you want people to remember about the Nine for Peace?

01-01:38:42 Mather: Well, it's a good question. During the period of time where people were singing "Onward, Christian Soldier[s]," in church, and using that kind of political and religious manipulation—I call it spiritual materialism—to encourage, force, in whatever way, to cohesively put together religion and the Army and the government and the flag and everything, wrap it up into a nice little package, you know, and try to sell it to the generation—and they didn't buy it, but it still had a big effect on them. I think that's one of the reasons that there's an inherent mistrust of our government today, and rightly so.

The Nine, what I want you to remember, is that these guys had absolutely nothing much to lose by doing this. They had everything to gain—their own self-respect, their own dignity, their own strength, if you will. I think that's what it took. I think it took a bit of strength; some were stronger than others, and that's always the case. In those cases we just tried to be supportive and encouraging of the others. It's like I can totally understand why Sunny, and these other guys, and Chuck Jones and George Dounis did not take part in the mutiny, in the demonstration, because they already had their sentence, and they didn't want any more.

01-01:40:39 Berglund Sokolov: So I think we're going to end here for today.

01-01:40:40 Mather: Okay, okay.

01-01:40:42 Berglund Sokolov: And then move into your time in the stockade when we pick up in our next segment. Is there anything that you want to add before we close up for this session?

01-01:40:56 Mather: I'd just say that when they took us away out of the church in Marin City, finally, when it ended and they lined up behind us, around us were about a hundred supporters, sitting on the floor all around us, and all these cops, different uniformed cops, had to step through this mess to get to us. All the time, these people in the crowd were talking to them, telling them not to take us, telling them that the war was wrong, telling them that they're breaking the law, this is a sanctuary. Running it all down to them. They stood there

the whole time, and listening to that all around them, and some of these guys I know by looking at them that they'd been to church before. And with the cameras rolling, and that getting on TV, oh—it was powerful man, I'm telling you.

01-01:41:53 Berglund Sokolov: Who were the people sitting in the circle, sitting there?

01-01:41:59 Mather: Friends from high school, neighbors.

01-01:42:02 Berglund Sokolov: Were they mostly young people?

01-01:42:02 Mather: Yeah, mostly young, mostly young people. Some of the ministers—there was a mix, but some of the parishioners from those churches.

01-01:42:12 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

01-01:42:13 Mather: Yeah, there was an African American contingent, if you will, that said to us—they were from the projects just right up the hill from that church.

01-01:42:22 Berglund Sokolov: In Marin City.

01-01:42:24 Mather: Yeah, and they said, "Hey, you know, you don't have to go if you don't want to go, dude." We said, "Thank you, but we're doing it our way, but thank you very much." Because they would have thrown down for us, or something—I don't know what they were thinking. But that was what was going on. There was choices between violence and non-violence. The Panthers were wanting to go another way. There was all this happening then, here—right here. Yeah, yeah.

01-01:42:59 Berglund Sokolov: Okay, so I think this is a good point for us to wrap up for today.

01-01:43:02 Mather: Good enough; thank you, very much.

01-01:43:04 Farrell: [in the background] Thank you.

01-01:43:04 Berglund Sokolov: Thank you, yeah.

Interview 2: August 14, 2018

02-00:00:01 Berglund Sokolov: This is Barbara Berglund Sokolov with Keith Mather. This is our second session recording his experiences with the Nine for Peace and the Presidio 27 and his time in the Presidio stockade. Today is Tuesday, August 14, 2018, and we're at the Presidio of San Francisco. We left off last time right at the end of the Nine for Peace story, just as you were being brought into the stockade here. Can you tell us about some of your memories of what it was like to enter the stockade? I think, if I remember correctly, you'd been there before?

02-00:00:49 Mather: That's correct. Yeah, I was.

02-00:00:51 Berglund Sokolov: Okay, so maybe if you can talk a little bit about that first time, and then similarities and differences coming in the second time?

02-00:00:58 Mather: Sure. Yeah. The first time that I went into the stockade was basically me talking with my father and deciding the best thing for me to do is probably turn myself in after a short AWOL, maybe four or five days, or something like that, and so I did.

02-00:01:16 Berglund Sokolov: That was after a Christmas leave or something like that?

02-00:01:20 Mather: My memory isn't that good on that. I did stay longer after a Christmas leave. I'm just trying to equate that with your question. So yeah, it must have been that time. I don't remember going AWOL too many times, but there was a previous time. Sorry, I just remembered. There was a previous time that I had gone AWOL from training, and my dad quickly encouraged me to go back. I went back, they gave me an Article 15 and sent me back to duty, and I went to another company.

At Christmas time, when I went AWOL, I also came back days late, but I came back with civilian jewelry on, earrings, a knitted tie. The brass on my uniform was discarded at a party—gifts, you know? They put me in a Special Processing Detachment, and then I stayed there until they recycled me into a Vietnam-bound company, and I saw what was going on. They were issuing us combat boots—you know, jungle boots and nylon fatigues. The previous cycle of trainees were—their orders were being called out, out on the quadrangle, and it didn't sound good to me. You know, Da Nang? No, it didn't sound good. So I kind of made a choice then—a decision of when, how, what, I'm not sure—but I just said, "Well, I'm just going to do the

obvious: go on sick call. It's the only way to get out of here—put some civilian clothes underneath and fake it, and get out of here."

02-00:03:18 Berglund Sokolov: That's when you left Fort Lewis?

02-00:03:20 Mather: That's when I left Fort Lewis for good, yeah. And then there was an extended AWOL, like six months probably, or so. It got old because the paranoia does creep in after a while. Of course, I was imbibing in a few drugs at that time, and also couch-surfing, not really able to stay with my parents because the man, you know, the FBI or whatever, was probably looking, and I didn't want to get picked up. I didn't want to have them have any hard time—or my friends that I was staying with from time to time. So I started to look for a way through this, and my mother handed me this piece of paper with a phone number and the name of the War Resisters League on it that she got out of the Yellow Pages, I think. I called them up and went up to visit and met Randy Kehler—and that's that. That was the beginning of the Nine.

But to go back to the jail time, when I first got there the first time, I was in and out, really overnight, maybe two days I was there, three days. They picked me up and put me on a plane to go back to Fort Lewis. The second time I entered it was much more adversarial. [laughing] They knew we were coming, and they knew we were coming into the jail. It was on the news, and a lot of people were pissed off. [microphone rubbing] [technical interruption to adjust microphone] The staff of the stockade was—some were angry, some were just didn't want to be there either. But I immediately [went] into the facility and [was] put in solitary for a day or so and then brought out and marched upstairs to be put in the general population, and they were just like very abusive. It was like yelling, screaming, hurry up, move, quit looking around—just really on you, you know? I just started slowing down, slouching, and not playing their game. They took me upstairs, and that's when I decided that I wasn't going to play their game at all. I took my uniform off and dropped it on the ground while the sergeant was just going crazy on me, and I just, you know, let him. I said no to him, and then he called an officer and I said no to him. And so I made my own situation then. I had chosen a different path—it was complete noncooperation. I didn't eat for three days. I didn't wear my uniform for a long period of time—like months and months—and I spent a lot of time in solitary confinement because of it.

02-00:06:35 Berglund Sokolov: How long after you arrived in the stockade did that happen, when you took your uniform off? Did they bring you in and put you into solitary first?

02-00:06:46 Mather: Yes, they did. Yeah.

02-00:06:47 Berglund Sokolov: For a period of time, and then they brought you upstairs to bring you into the general population, and that's where it happened on that second-floor landing?

02-00:06:56 Mather: On the landing, exactly. That's pretty well it. Everything is not as clear as it should be, but at the same time I do remember distinctly being really harassed coming in the door, just like you were in basic training again, you know, like on you. So then, once I made my little stand there, up on the landing, they didn't mess with me a lot anymore because I had kind of made my statement.

02-00:07:29 Berglund Sokolov: Were you the only one from the Army who came, from the Nine for Peace?

02-00:07:34 Mather: No, we all came. We all came.

02-00:07:35 Berglund Sokolov: To the stockade?

02-00:07:36 Mather: We all came in.

02-00:07:37 Berglund Sokolov: Did you all come in at the same time?

02-00:07:40 Mather: Five of us came in. We were all Army; we all came in at the same time.

02-00:07:42 Berglund Sokolov: And then the other four were from the other branches of the military?

02-00:07:45 Mather: They went off to TI [Treasure Island], and whatever bases they were taken to.

02-00:07:50 Berglund Sokolov: And were you all given similar treatment?

02-00:07:53 Mather: Well, no. No, I don't think so. I don't know if the other guys went into solitary—I don't remember, for their isolation period. They may have for the day or something. I don't recollect what happened to others, necessarily. They were there, they were there during the mutiny. They were doing that action. They chose not to participate because they already had pretrial agreements for two years, and that would nullify that, and then they have two charges that have to go. It was a better deal for them, and I didn't blame them one bit. As I said earlier, I never was offered a pretrial agreement.

02-00:08:38 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know why that is?

02-00:08:38 Mather: I was singled out.

02-00:08:39 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know why that is?

02-00:08:41 Mather: I was singled out. Period.

02-00:08:43 Berglund Sokolov: So the others from the Nine for Peace who were in the stockade with you, they were able to pretty quickly make deals?

02-00:08:52 Mather: Deals were offered them. They don't make deals. If it isn't offered, you can't accept it. It wasn't like this. Really, they said, "Okay, for you, you, you. And you—we're going to offer you the pretrial agreement." I didn't get offered one though. I'm sure my lawyers would have told me to accept it, you know, and so forth, and so on, because I got four years at my trial, where these guys got two years, and they would have been out in a year and a half at the most. So no—I was singled out from the beginning because I was the local boy. I was from San Bruno. They went to me in the interviews right away, you know? The Army then had no choice, and to see me as that individual, in that light. It's just the way it is, you know? Just the way it is.

02-00:09:43 Berglund Sokolov: When you entered the stockade the second time, did the place feel different, smell different than it had before?

02-00:09:54 Mather: It was familiar. It was familiar. I didn't retain those memories too much, but the thing is, is that yeah, I kind of knew the lay of the land a little, a little. I didn't have the ins and outs. I didn't know the people.

02-00:10:10 Berglund Sokolov: Was it more crowded the second time in?

02-00:10:11 Mather: Oh yeah. Yeah. There was more activity going on. People were coming in from Germany. Some people were coming through from Vietnam going to Leavenworth, Korea. There were people coming through from all different situations. There were murderers in cells next to me, you know? Stabbed a guy in Germany, over a woman, and things like that went on. It's all the different things that you'd see in a jail. At the same time, most of the people that were there, I'd say a predominant number of the people who were there were there for simple AWOL, or maybe petty things. It wasn't like it was a political enclave at all. But the motivation and the absolute hatred of the

military, the draft—the thing that brought them in—and then how they were treated. You're treated like dirt, you know? And with no respect, at all, at any time, and you're constantly having to put up with people that you probably wouldn't even let put air in your tires on the outside. But you've got to suck it up and just deal with it, and a lot of these guys aren't like that. [laughing]

02-00:11:30 Berglund Sokolov: What were some of your earliest memories of solitary?

02-00:11:35 Mather: Oh, a little loneliness, in a way. Division, like divided from the rest of my people. But there were things that went on in solitary that couldn't go on anywhere else. You could have long, drawn out, one-on-one conversations. You could analyze stuff. You could say I wonder why this is? I wonder how we could screw them up in this area.

02-00:11:59 Berglund Sokolov: In conversations with the person in the cell next door?

02-00:12:02 Mather: Yeah, or in the back of me or over in the corner. There were five cells.

02-00:12:05 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

02-00:12:06 Mather: Yeah. We'd have to keep it kind of on the down low because we didn't want them to know what we're talking about that much, although they probably listened a lot.

02-00:12:13 Berglund Sokolov: Do you remember any of those conversations, the details of them or the topics?

02-00:12:19 Mather: Well, you know, it was about what you're in for. The obvious questions somebody's going to ask: where are you from? When are you going to get out of here? And you might find other ways to bond. I bonded with a couple of guys because they were resisting too, you know, in their own way, privately, without anything outside at all. One guy just took off his uniform, refused to eat, and refused to speak. Would take his tray and leave it there, and that was an act of defiance in the self. Any little way you could. You know, you'd help those who were doing that and support them, because they were truly alone, and everybody knew it. They maybe didn't even understand or agree with the reasons behind them doing it. They were still supportive of them because we're all in there. It's just this cold concrete building with a bunch of steel cages in it.

02-00:13:28 Berglund Sokolov: What was the response like to people who were fasting, to people who had taken off their uniforms, to other kinds of nonviolent dissent [or] refusal?

02-00:13:46 Mather: Yeah, well, you know, most of the people who were in there were, I would say, mostly nonviolent. How are you going to be violent in jail, unless you're going to have to fight for something? So there was not a lot of violence. There was some, but it isn't like there was combative relationships going on over the long haul. If there was a problem between two people, other people would step in and say, "Hey, you guys sort it out. We don't want to have to kick both your asses. You guys sort it out."

02-00:14:19 Berglund Sokolov: Between the prisoners?

02-00:14:20 Mather: Yeah, we didn't want it. It was already hard enough. Don't let them turn you against each other. What are you doing? We're on this side of the fence, and they're on that side of the fence. See? Don't do that. If you've got a problem with him, work it out man. You're going to be here a while.

02-00:14:43 Berglund Sokolov: Was it kind of an attempt to create solidarity among the prisoners who were there, even with some there for actual violent crime, some there for AWOL and refusing to serve?

02-00:15:02 Mather: Yeah, they kept us isolated from the people that were hyperviolent or they'd ship them out. They wouldn't keep them there that long. Well, because they would process them quickly. Because usually their violence was happening on the outside first, and then they brought them in, and if they were violent inside, then they'd just throw them in the box. Just throw them in and leave them there, you know? The other thing about the box, the solitary confinement, or "the box" as we called it, was funny. Randy sent me a message about—I'll get back to it—about the box lunches, and he was saying, "A little different than we were used to back in the day." Anyway. [laughter] But yeah, so these solitary confinement cells were kind of gruesome, painted black, with the paint peeling, and really no access to anything. Like I said, you couldn't even hardly get a cigarette through the mesh that they put over the doors and the walls, and so you're isolated completely.

02-00:16:15 Berglund Sokolov: Were some guards more antagonistic than others?

02-00:16:21 Mather: You mean to the guards, antagonistic, or generally?

02-00:16:25 Berglund Sokolov: To the prisoners. Were some guards more antagonistic? Were some more allies? Were you mostly the same age?

02-00:16:36 Mather: Yeah, even though we were mostly the same age, I think they always looked older to us. They carried this crap around with them, and we didn't. Like that they had the righteous authority to be however they want to be, and all that.

02-00:16:54 Berglund Sokolov: Were they armed inside the stockade?

02-00:16:55 Mather: No, no. There were no weapons inside the stockade at all, inside, and they couldn't even bring them inside the gate.

02-00:17:01 Berglund Sokolov: Of the gated area of the stockade?

02-00:17:02 Mather: The gated area. No, you don't bring weapons inside, no, no, no. There was a shotgun guard just outside the fence, for the period of time I was there.

02-00:17:14 Berglund Sokolov: Did they have clubs or other kinds of weapons?

02-00:17:16 Mather: No, no, no, no, no, no.

02-00:17:17 Berglund Sokolov: So nothing?

02-00:17:17 Mather: They had them, but they didn't wear them, okay? They were in their lockup, but they weren't used. If they needed to pull somebody out of a cell, away from a group or whatever, they'd just come in strong with four or five guys and grab that person and drag him out, and that's the only safe way they could do it. And I kind of appreciated that at the time. You know, you have to be aggressive, and you have to go in and grab them and pull them out, whatever, because otherwise it's going to cause a meltdown, and they couldn't show any weakness around it. They had to be aggressive, so I understood that, and that just happened.

02-00:18:00 Berglund Sokolov: What were some of the kinds of episodes that would bring on something like that happening, where the guards would have to come in and remove somebody or restrain someone?

02-00:18:11 Mather: Usually something that had happened, if you had flipped off the commander, or something like that. [laughing] He would go into solitary for whatever

period of time, until they talked some sense into him, or whatever the deal was. But people would get in fights or just have problems, for whatever reason. If they were having a difficulty over weeks staying inside, you know, staying in solitary, some guys would get pulled out for a day or two and then put right back in. They could do another twenty-eight days. We would fake fights. We had to get volunteers to fake fights so we could fill up the solitary confinement cells so quickly they'd have to pull him out.

02-00:19:03 Berglund Sokolov: If someone was struggling with the isolation?

02-00:19:05 Mather: Yeah, we'd find out about it through the chow hall, or the guys taking the chow in. We'd find out about it. The message would get to us real quickly, and we'd get him out, one way or the other. Sometimes we'd have to put two, three guys in the box to get him out, but then we reach our goal. Yeah. So I mean, that was our way of fighting against this solitary incarceration.

02-00:19:32 Berglund Sokolov: And within both solitary and the general population, there were suicide attempts during this period?

02-00:19:39 Mather: Oh, sure.

02-00:19:40 Berglund Sokolov: And suicides. Can you talk a little bit about that and what kind of environment that created in the stockade?

02-00:19:47 Mather: There was a lot of anxiety inside the stockade, okay? A lot of anxiety about how much time you're going to do, if you're going to get sent back to duty, if you're going to get more charges before you can get out of here. A really hard time, a small jail, a very hard time.

02-00:20:08 Berglund Sokolov: When you say hard time, can you explain what that means?

02-00:20:10 Mather: There's nothing there. If you want to lift weights, you've got to take the two Folgers cans full of concrete, and a steel bar, and go outside and lift weights. There was really no effort, at all, to reestablish a contact from the military to these people. It was adversarial. It was you're dirt—we've got the keys. It was just like a setup for nothing's going to work here, nothing—and they didn't care at all. We were disposable. They didn't give a damn about us. That's one of the reasons that we were afraid a lot of the time of what might happen. But the stockade is just a little bitty jail, really, a really small jail. Compared to the jails of today, it's an archaic prison, okay? There are people who pulled like a year there, and that's just terrible.

02-00:21:13 Berglund Sokolov: But some people did try to take their own lives in that setting?

02-00:21:16 Mather: There were something like over sixty suicide attempts that were written about—not all of them while I was there. Only one, that we know of, is successful, and that was Richard Bunch, if it indeed was a suicidal move on his part. There were guys who would tie off their arm, run around the room, or just run around the room like crazy for thirty minutes, and then tie off their arm and slash it with a razor blade and watch the blood squirt across the room. Yeah, in view of everybody. There was the other guy who slit his throat in solitary confinement after coming off morphine right from Vietnam. They took him to the hospital, stitched him up, put him in a straitjacket and brought him back to the stockade. Put him in a solitary confinement cell, where he shouldered up to the bars and said, "Hey, can you untie this for me?" And the guy reached right around and untied it for him, and he proceeded to pull out his stitches and put the straitjacket over his head and lay down to die. But they got to him and took him to the hospital, and then they kept him till he was healed up. This guy's a Vietnam veteran, combat veteran, okay? This is how we treated that mental illness then, okay? So yeah, there's a few stories like that. And guys who drank shampoo, Clorox, any number of guys slit their wrists—tried—fasting is certainly a health risk. Guys trying to escape is a health risk, and there were four or five attempts to escape while I was there. Two people shot, one killed. I don't know how many other successful escapes there were, you know, that lasted a long time. But it was a pressure cooker. Some people were doing all these things because there was, we were—it was so compressed.

02-00:23:54 Berglund Sokolov: It sounds like there was a lot of desperation.

02-00:23:57 Mather: Well, yeah, we were all young. We all wanted to be out doing what young people do. We had no business in that jail; we had no business in the military, obviously. But the Army, they don't let go. So, that's what they don't do.

02-00:24:16 Berglund Sokolov: Can you talk a little bit about some of the guards who were sympathetic?

02-00:24:19 Mather: Sure. You asked me earlier about the guards that were adversarial. There were a few, but I don't remember them much. The guys that had a heart, there were a few. The one that comes to mind most readily is Roger Broomfield. He was a guard commander. He was a specialist, MP, guard commander. He had served in Germany and then came here for his last eight months or something, and they stuck him doing this, and he did not like it. But when the peace activism started happening and things like that—he lived in the Haight-Ashbury. He lived off-base, separate rations. He had a

nice life, but he had to come back in every single day and go to jail, cross this line and go into that jail.

02-00:25:19 Berglund Sokolov: By crossing the line you mean not just the gates, but the increasing numbers of protestors?

02-00:25:23 Mather: [laughing] It's the line. No, it's just an emotional, psychological line, when you're leaving where you want to be and going where you know nobody wants to be. You've got to make sure they're in there and keep them there and not let them escape, and listen to—very difficult for him. I'm lifelong friends with this guy, and I worked together with him for years after we're both out of the Army and stuff. But I think it was really, really, really hard on him. He's a pretty soft guy, and that's not a job for a guy like him. He would protect people when he could. He was the guy who said, "We've got to come in fast and get this guy out of here. I'm sorry, your friend, but we've got to do this." And I said, "Yeah, that's good. I understand. Just don't hurt him."

02-00:26:16 Berglund Sokolov: Was your friend Walter?

02-00:26:18 Mather: No, no, no. This was just a sundry prisoner. I don't remember who. A lot of people, they'd get into something, in line for chow, they'd get into a beef in the bathroom because they wanted somebody to hurry up, or something. You know, it didn't take a lot. I told you that the guard that pushed Filinako Hemphill after he had come back from the hospital after being shot—

02-00:26:48 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, tell us a little bit about that shooting.

02-00:26:49 Mather: Yeah, well, I wasn't there for the shooting. I was there for him coming back from the hospital. The story I heard was that he, a Vietnam vet, came back on compassionate leave because his child was being born. The child was born; I guess his leave's done. Ain't going back, now especially, right? So Filinako, like a lot of people, got behind some drugs, and I think he was probably doing speed. That's my thought. And so when he came back into the jail, after he got picked up, he had a deer in the headlights, like this, you know? They took him outside the gate, the same gate that I showed you, the one with the few stairs that go down to the gate, to get his bedding and uniform, some laundry, right? As soon as he got beside that gate, he just started sprinting, started running, and an armed guard, I think outside of the stockade, pulled his .45 and shot him in the back.

02-00:27:57 Berglund Sokolov: Because he was able to make it outside the stockade, and there was an open gate?

02-00:28:01 Mather: Right.

02-00:28:02 Berglund Sokolov: And he made it.

02-00:28:02 Mather: Yeah, the gate goes in the street. He was in the street running.

02-00:28:04 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, yeah.

02-00:28:05 Mather: And shot him in the back and he went to the hospital, had surgeries to remove part of his spleen—or his spleen and part of his stomach, laid in bed up there for twenty-eight days, and then rudely brought back into the stockade and pushed by this young guard, saying, "Get in the top bunk." Filinako told him, "I can't get in no top bunk." He was hurting because the guy just pushed him, and the guy yelled at him again. So Filinako just spun around and hit him right in the face as hard as he could and knocked this little guy out. And shortly after that, a couple of the brothers, as we referred to them then, the black guys—because Filinako was dark, you know?

02-00:28:56 Berglund Sokolov: Because he was Samoan Pacific Islander?

02-00:28:57 Mather: Yeah, he's Samoan. He was Samoan, yeah. They picked up this guard and dropped him down the stairwell. Boom. Bye. Don't need you here.

02-00:29:05 Berglund Sokolov: That's a pretty significant drop.

02-00:29:08 Mather: I wouldn't want to fall. It's ten feet onto concrete stairs. We never saw him again. Hopefully, he's okay. I didn't hear nothing about that.

02-00:29:25 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know what happened to Filinako?

02-00:29:26 Mather: No, I don't. No, I don't. I don't remember, to tell you the truth, if he was still there. He might have got shipped out. I don't know where he was going. He might have gotten out because of the wound and all of the other things. They couldn't house him—I don't know. There's no way to know. We were so focused on getting out ourselves. We all were focused on getting out.

02-00:29:52 Berglund Sokolov: Talk about that a little bit, and how the thinking about getting out—is it escape? Is it through these pretrial deals? How are people thinking about how they're going to manage the situation they find themselves in?

02-00:30:12 Mather: Oh, we'd talk about it from time to time, but most of the time we'd spend our time when we were together talking about other things.

02-00:30:20 Berglund Sokolov: Like what?

02-00:30:22 Mather: About fun, about music, about dessert. [laughing]

02-00:30:27 Berglund Sokolov: What kind of music?

02-00:30:29 Mather: Oh, all kinds of music. We were kind of the ones who would—we'd hear the guards playing their radio downstairs, you know, so it was like all the music that was being played here was being played in the stockade, and we were lucky enough to be in Supply. Music would be playing most of the day in the chow hall, most of the day, because people are working, they've got music playing.

02-00:30:49 Berglund Sokolov: Do you remember any particular songs you heard while you were there?

02-00:30:52 Mather: Oh yeah, a couple, sure, a couple. "Hey Jude" was poignant because it's such an emotional song. I remember listening to it when I was in Supply up in Building 1212, when it was still there, and how I just got this feeling, because I adored the music. I had so many friends that played music, and I would go to all the concerts I could and saw a lot of the stars of the time and was enamored with it completely. It's a spiritual thing, a real spiritual thing that the music, the music—

02-00:31:34 Berglund Sokolov: Why do you say that? Was it that time? Was it in general?

02-00:31:37 Mather: It was in general. It was certainly the time, but the music was the message.

02-00:31:43 Berglund Sokolov: What was the message?

02-00:31:44 Mather: It was laid in between the lines. It was other obvious ones, like after Kent State, Ohio, you know? For what it's worth, back in 1967, there were all these messages going on, and you could either pick up on them or not,

depending on where you were at. I think that's the way I used to say it. But we knew when we heard that music that we were part of our generation.

02-00:32:23 Berglund Sokolov: And that music was for you.

02-00:32:23 Mather: Yeah. Exactly. And it wasn't for our parents. It was for us. It was like the '50s melted away. You get to be emotional; you get to be honest. You don't have to be stoic. You get to do whatever you want to do, and that was the way we were coming out of those times—and the music led us along. It was a communal experience, in a way. Everybody likes to dance, right?

02-00:32:57 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, well.

02-00:32:58 Mather: Pretty simple.

02-00:32:58 Berglund Sokolov: I know you mentioned to me when we were in the stockade that you watched Soul Train up in the general population, and I'm really curious about like what kind of music did you hear on Soul Train? In my mind Soul Train is a black show.

02-00:33:15 Mather: Oh yeah, totally. You think we were going to argue with all the black guys and say, "No, you can't watch Soul Train?" We're not going to do that.

02-00:33:21 Berglund Sokolov: Well, tell me a little bit about that.

02-00:33:23 Mather: Well, no, it was like we would struggle over shows we'd want to watch. No, we're not watching Disneyland, okay? But you know, guys would say, "I want to watch this." And we'd go, "Look around the room. Anybody got an objection?" We'd kind of figure it out. But there were a few shows we liked to watch, like anything with music on it, and Soul Train was certainly the best show for R&B and blues.

02-00:33:53 Berglund Sokolov: Do you remember any particular sessions watching Soul Train?

02-00:33:58 Mather: Well, it was great, because the black guys would get so animated! [laughing] And they would be really happy—kind of happy—you know?

02-00:34:06 Berglund Sokolov: Did people dance?

02-00:34:05 Mather: Huh?

02-00:34:06 Berglund Sokolov: Did people dance when it was on?

02-00:34:08 Mather: Oh, yeah, I'm sure they did, a little. I don't know. I don't remember so much of that, but I remember many times—there's even pictorial evidence of it in Sir! No Sir! of the mutineers dancing as they were going into court. [laughing] Things like that. So yeah, we were a fun group.

02-00:34:35 Berglund Sokolov: You had mentioned in our earlier session that you had been into dance, and that you liked to dance. Was that part of the attraction of Soul Train, of watching those dancers?

02-00:34:46 Mather: Oh sure. Yeah, it's all inherent. Absolutely. That along with just hearing the music because I've got to tap my foot—it was automatic. That's just the way it is. But it was a lot of fun. I mean listening to the music, singing together at times harmonizing against a wall, and things like that. We tried to fill our days.

02-00:35:17 Berglund Sokolov: Do you remember anything you sang in there?

02-00:35:18 Mather: No, I'm afraid I don't really.

02-00:35:18 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:35:20 Mather: We did sing an adapted version of "For What It's Worth," when Filinako was there, because he was shot and all that. And after he was back in the jail, one night that song came on, and we were thinking about it, so we started writing a song for Filinako. He got involved. "We've got to stop, hey— and then I hit a pillow, boom, on the concrete slab, which makes a big sound." And there was a verse, "There goes Filinako going down." And it was kind of like pretty morbid, but he was into it, you know? He was like, "Yeah!" That's one of my memories, sure, one of my memories.

02-00:36:09 Berglund Sokolov: Can you talk about some of the visitors that you had when you were in the stockade, and what it was like? Did you get more visitors than other people because you were local?

02-00:36:17 Mather: Oh yeah, sure.

02-00:36:19 Berglund Sokolov: And the Nine for Peace connection—just kind of take us through how visitors and visitation played out.

02-00:36:29 Mather: I got a lot of visits. I was probably one of the very fortunate guys that got visits, and I felt bad about it, I mean, because I got so much. My mother, my brothers, my sisters, my older sister, ministers. I had an appointed, in a way, fiancée, Adrienne Fong, part of the movement, who would come in and visit.

02-00:36:55 Berglund Sokolov: What was her role?

02-00:36:58 Mather: Of a friend, a friend and a confidant, to let me know what was going on within the movement, for me, and also to get messages out to other people, but I didn't have a lot of problem doing that. [rustling sounds] I was able to almost get daily visits, even though Sunday is the day for visiting, Sunday morning. Because the ministers first came to the stockade and were turned away, and so they went and called a newspaper. [laughing] The newspaper came up with them, with a camera I think, and gee, all of a sudden the Army decided to let them in.

02-00:37:46 Berglund Sokolov: Were they some of the ministers who had been involved with the Nine? Is that how you had that connection?

02-00:37:48 Mather: Yeah, the clergy and laity. There were four of five ministers that were with us, with the Army guys, that were kind of our assigned group, and they all put in a request to visit each one of us, you know? But at one point I was getting a visit every single afternoon.

02-00:38:08 Berglund Sokolov: And was Adrienne part of that Nine for Peace group? Is that how she was brought into this?

02-00:38:15 Mather: Yeah, she was an integral part of that whole group and process, along with Phil Farnham, who was the minister of the Howard Presbyterian Church on Oak. Him and his parishioners invited us into their church. It was also the church that the Diggers were using their kitchen to feed in the Panhandle, so this was a very movement-oriented, progressive church, and Phil Farnham later became the head of the Communist Party in New York City, so he became politicized, if he wasn't already, over this particular thing. Where were we? I'm sorry. [laughing]

02-00:39:05 Berglund Sokolov: We were talking about your visitors and visitation, and what that was like. And the ministers, was their role to counsel you in a religious way? Or was it to provide other kinds of guidance, or both?

02-00:39:25 Mather: Whatever we asked for, I think, really. I think they were available. They made themselves available, took out of their own time, their own days, to come up to that jail on a regular basis, for months, okay? There was never a day that visit didn't happen. There wasn't a day.

02-00:39:48 Berglund Sokolov: That was from your earliest time in solitary, to the general population, to back to solitary?

02-00:39:55 Mather: No, it was like this: it's like once I was in solitary, it became even more important to get me out once in a while. So my sister Paula would come up to the stockade and have to visit in the old chapel, because I was in a blanket and underwear.

02-00:40:15 Berglund Sokolov: Because you weren't wearing your uniform?

02-00:40:16 Mather: Yeah, and so they couldn't deny me visitation. They could deny me everything else, but they couldn't deny me visitation, especially with the pressure that was being brought to bear on them, period, by the Catholic priest, Methodist minister. Come on, there was a lot of pressure. Also their churches, their parishioners, were writing letters, so there was all this support for me, okay? I would try to get word out of a new prisoner's name and then get a name of an attorney. I'd ask them, "Bring two attorneys' names. I'm going to give you two prisoners' names, and they can each ask for each other, and then they can get that attorney." That's the only way you could get an attorney. You have to have their name, right?

02-00:41:00 Berglund Sokolov: Was there a network of attorneys that were starting to do work for people who were resisting the war?

02-00:41:07 Mather: Sure. There were several networks of attorneys. There was, of course, the clergy and laity, the ministers, and then there was the counseling service, legal counseling services here that did an amazing amount of work, not only here but in Vietnam and in Germany. My attorney worked in all those places, including here, defending GIs.

02-00:41:30 Berglund Sokolov: Who was your attorney?

02-00:41:31 Mather: Howard De Nike was my attorney at the end. He was an attorney for the Twenty-Seven. I had five attorneys when I went up for the Nine for Peace. I had Howard [C.] Anawalt, Howard Engelskirchen also—so many names, I'm losing it. Terry Hallinan and Howard De Nike and Capt. Brendan [V.] Sullivan and Capt. [Thomas] Faye, another guy.

02-00:42:04 Berglund Sokolov: They were all involved in your first trial for the Nine?

02-00:42:08 Mather: Yeah.

02-00:42:09 Berglund Sokolov: And some of those were civilian attorneys, and some were military attorneys?

02-00:42:12 Mather: Yeah, two military, three civilian.

02-00:42:16 Berglund Sokolov: Who were the two military?

02-00:42:17 Mather: Captain Brendan Sullivan and Captain Faye. I don't remember his first name.

02-00:42:23 Berglund Sokolov: How did, when you were getting visitors, whether it was attorneys, ministers, family members—you said you were getting a lot more visitors than other people. How did the other prisoners react to that, that you know of?

02-00:42:37 Mather: Look at him. He's lucky. He's getting visits. At the same time, I was doing work for some of the guys in there, and if they didn't know that I was doing the work that was fine, and however they felt was fine. But right around Christmas, right, when it gets really hard and you're in jail at Christmas—it's really no fun. I digress. The mail started coming in for the holidays, for everybody, right? But I started getting a lot of mail—and I don't mean like thirty letters. I mean a duffel bag full of mail. You ever get that much mail? No? I did.

02-00:43:25 Berglund Sokolov: Did they think—?

02-00:43:25 Mather: Full of mail. A couple times a week, from people from all over the world.

02-00:43:31 Berglund Sokolov: Did you read it all?

02-00:43:34 Mather: What I did, because I couldn't read it all, I handed them out to the guys who didn't get any mail. I said, "I can't read them all. I don't deserve all this. Here, you guys, come on—let's just look at these." I'd just hand them out, and we'd all sit around, and some of them we'd read, "Hey, this one's from Germany. This one's from Australia. This one's," you know?

02-00:43:55 Berglund Sokolov: Was most of it from civilian supporters?

02-00:43:58 Mather: Yeah, civilian supporters.

02-00:43:59 Berglund Sokolov: Or were some military as well?

02-00:44:01 Mather: I wouldn't remember that, but I wouldn't maybe even know unless they told me in a letter, and that would be compromising, I think. But no, it was just like civilians, people from Louisiana, people from Arkansas, people from Texas. Unbelievable.

02-00:44:17 Berglund Sokolov: People knew your story because of the Nine for Peace story?

02-00:44:20 Mather: Yeah, exactly. It was promoted around the world, actually. In those days it took a little longer, I think. [laughing] But yeah. You've got to understand the mutiny already happened, like months before that. I was back in my uniform planning to escape. I was in Building 1212 living there, not inside the main building. Because I was sentenced in November, they thought it was all done. "Oh, we got him. He's just going to wait here to go to Leavenworth." Right? The only reason I put my uniform [on]—well, two reasons to put my uniform back on. One was so they would try me, instead of me doing dead time and not having it count for anything.

02-00:45:11 Berglund Sokolov: When did you put your uniform back on?

02-00:45:13 Mather: So I could be tried, like I just mentioned.

02-00:45:16 Berglund Sokolov: Right, and when was your trial, just so we get the timeline straight.

02-00:45:20 Mather: It was in November. It was in November—I think the fourth of November.

02-00:45:23 Berglund Sokolov: After the mutiny?

02-00:45:24 Mather: Yeah.

02-00:45:25 Berglund Sokolov: And that would—

02-00:45:26 Mather: The mutiny was the fourteenth of October.

02-00:45:30 Berglund Sokolov: Because you'd already had a trial for the Nine for Peace.

02-00:45:33 Mather: My trial for the Nine for Peace was in November.

02-00:45:35 Berglund Sokolov: After the mutiny.

02-00:45:37 Mather: Correct.

02-00:45:37 Berglund Sokolov: Okay, so they combined both together.

02-00:45:39 Mather: No, they did not combine them both. I was tried only on the refusing a direct order and desertion charges.

02-00:45:45 Berglund Sokolov: Got it.

02-00:45:46 Mather: That was the Nine for Peace court-martial. I was then sentenced to four years, and I had put my uniform back on so I could be tried. That was one of my ploys. Oh yeah, I'll put my uniform on so you can be tried, but I'm leaving, you know? After I got four years and I saw the Article 32 board starting up for the mutiny, that made my choice.

02-00:46:13 Berglund Sokolov: At what point did you start thinking about escape? Take us through that process and maybe a little bit about what was in the air in the stockade about escape and how people thought about it or talked about it?

02-00:46:27 Mather: Sure. We were very young. Everybody ought to understand that. At the most we were mid-twenties, the oldest, and so getting out of jail was the main deal. If you can get out by doing this or doing that, if you can get transferred, if you can just say, "Hey, I'll do anything. I'll go back to duty." But they just don't let you out. You just try to figure out ways of making it easy on yourself—easier on yourself. I saw ahead of me nothing but possibly a decade or two behind bars. I was twenty-two. That was hard to take. I didn't

see any other way out than to leave confinement and beat it out of the country. I was looking pretty hard. I didn't see any alternative unless I was just going to go do my time. That was my other choice. I didn't figure I deserved it, didn't figure I wanted to spend my life that way—there's got to be a better way.

Walter [Pawlowski] and I started talking about escape, and we looked around real hard at the whole situation. We didn't want to get shot. We didn't want that to go on. So we started being—schmoozing and really being—not overly friendly, but just kind of decent with the guards, all of them. Because I had never had really too much confrontation—I always went another way, kind of a passive way of doing it.

02-00:48:02 Berglund Sokolov: Do you want to tell us a little bit about Walter, since he's not here at this point to speak for himself?

02-00:48:06 Mather: Sure, I'd love to. Walter Pawlowski, Pennsylvania boy, I believe, East Coast. Smart. He went to college for a year or so. He had more college, I think, than many of us did. Tall, lanky, dark hair, kind of an olive complexion. Could have passed for Italian, you know, kind of guy. Bright. Really had a sparkle in his eye then. There's something about that guy. He had a sparkle in his eye, and the guy was amazing. He was a hustler, okay? I say that with all of the respect that I can give him. He knew how. He knew how to make things—to get what he needed to do for the next thing without taking a lot of effort. So we did that in jail, we said, "Well, we'll be carpenters. We'll fix all this and we get to use all these tools, and we get to use the hacksaw. We get to have the wire cutters, and we get to break into Supply and get all the stuff we need, because they're letting us work up there." It was just perfect, you know?

02-00:49:17 Berglund Sokolov: And that work was before or after the Twenty-Seven?

02-00:49:23 Mather: This work, for me, was after, okay? We had time—regardless of what we were doing beforehand, once they knew we were going to be there for a long time—and we had been there a long time as it was. Walter had done, I think, nine months in a Florida jail after coming back from Canada, after living there for a period of time and gaining landed immigrant status, right? He came back. He was selling some LSD or whatever—it wasn't a big reason, he was just coming back to do some kind of deal, again, some kind of a hustle. Him and his buddy trashed this room in a hotel. You've got to understand that Walter was wearing a velour suit with an Elizabethan collar, okay? So he got arrested.

02-00:50:27 Berglund Sokolov: Because he looked like the counterculture.

02-00:50:26 Mather: [coughing] Yeah, totally, yeah, in Florida.

02-00:50:29 Berglund Sokolov: In Florida.

02-00:50:30 Mather: Yeah. He got put into jail for trashing the room, and he spent nine months in this little shitty jail down there in Florida, and then the Army came and got him, took him to the Presidio, which was, I guess, close to one of the posts he was on. He had already done a year by the time we left, you know, or more. There wasn't any future for him here either, you know? He was already a landed immigrant. He had already got out once.

02-00:51:08 Berglund Sokolov: How did you meet Walter?

02-00:51:10 Mather: I met him in the stockade. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but he was there when I got there. So he was like—[clearing throat] excuse me—it was like he wanted to be in contact with me because of what I had done. [sound of children at play outside] He saw that, maybe. And maybe he was hustling all along. I don't think so though. Maybe he saw that as an avenue for him to be able to have access to more information, and so forth and so on, which is absolutely accurate. We teamed together once we decided to escape, and then we understood that it was very difficult to plan an escape, very difficult to plan. You never knew what was going to happen. No schedule really adhered to.

02-00:52:01 Berglund Sokolov: Was there writing involved in your planning for escape?

02-00:52:03 Mather: Writing?

02-00:52:04 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, or was it all conversation?

02-00:52:06 Mather: No, all conversation. Everything was conversation in jail. Everything. So anyway, the deal was that we decided that the only way to get out is to try to find our best opportunity, first best would be the way to go. We realized we had to take our tools outside of the stockade because those were the tools we had. We couldn't keep them inside the compound.

02-00:52:36 Berglund Sokolov: Let's back up for a little bit before we get to your escape.

02-00:52:41 Mather: Okay.

02-00:52:42 Berglund Sokolov: You've told us a little bit about Walter.

02-00:52:44 Mather: Yeah.

02-00:52:45 Berglund Sokolov: And we'll come back to that too, because I want to learn a little more about him. But let's talk about Richard, Richard Bunch.

02-00:52:52 Mather: Yeah. Well, Richard was, as you saw from his morgue pictures, a young man. Midwestern, probably naïve, and through his AWOL and visit to the Bay Area got involved in the drug culture, and as some have said, he had his circuits fried. He had a problem. There's no doubt about it, whatever may have caused it.

02-00:53:26 Berglund Sokolov: How did that manifest itself?

02-00:53:28 Mather: He would sit on his bunk and talk to himself, things like that—and answer himself at times too. We kind of figured that out, and we'd kind of look at him sideways and see if he's like putting us on, and he really wasn't. Really hard to tell, and it was hard to tell—you've got to look at him really hard. And so we just kind of left him alone. We were friendly with him. We'd make sure he went to chow, yeah, things like that. It was hard to communicate with him, hard to communicate with him.

02-00:54:03 Berglund Sokolov: Hard to connect with him because of his mental state?

02-00:54:08 Mather: He wasn't there, you know? He just wasn't there. And there was always something. He had a mental health issue. And I'm not a shrink, but I think that—

02-00:54:25 Berglund Sokolov: Whether that was preexisting, exacerbated by drug use, or some combination thereof, he was struggling.

02-00:54:32 Mather: Probably. You know, probably, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think the drugs cause these issues, I think they're there already.

02-00:54:39 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:54:41 Mather: Or parts of them anyway. He could function, but he was just kind of like the one kid in the group who goes a little slower than the rest and you've got to keep looking back for him, things like that. I just quit worrying about the guy, because he was just so out of it I figured well, something good [is] going to happen for him. Probably he's going to get out. Well, he did, but not quite the way he wanted to.

02-00:55:10 Berglund Sokolov: So even with his, in the mental state that he was in, he was still brought out for work details?

02-00:55:19 Mather: Yeah, and they denied his medication to him several different times. You know, a new shift would come on [and] he'd go, "I need my medication." He goes, "No, you're not getting your [medication]. Bye, see you later." The next morning he'd get his—

02-00:55:32 Berglund Sokolov: Why would they do that?

02-00:55:32 Mather: I have no idea. I've got a couple of ideas. They're not very nice people, I would say. That's a pretty cruel thing to do. I think probably they had no clue of what they were doing or what effect it would even have—or cared, for that matter. I have no idea. Why would anybody do that? But that was in the air all the time. You know, it was—you're in jail. People are not going to make you happy there, no matter what you do. As a matter of fact, there was even, I think, even among the cooking staff and everything else, there was this little bit of harassment. Everybody had to get their little dig in. Give me a break, you know? And so we became—[microphone adjustment]—we became really good at trying to upset them, trying to upset the guards, because they would constantly do it to us, right? It would be near the end of their shift or the beginning of their shift—whichever way we could mess with them the most. We would act up. We would act up in that cell; we'd act up in that cell; we'd act up in that cell; we'd act up downstairs. Somebody would yell over here.

02-00:57:00 Berglund Sokolov: What did acting up look like?

02-00:57:01 Mather: Oh, just like banging something, beating on the cell doors, kicking the cell doors. Yeah. "I want to go to the bathroom. I need to go to sick call." You know, whatever—things like that, till we had these guards kind of like going, "What's going on?" We started to control things.

02-00:57:21 Berglund Sokolov: Can you share with us some memories that you might have of the day that Richard went out for his last work detail?

02-00:57:30 Mather: All I remember is the guys coming back from that work detail. It was Lindy, Ricky, and a few others, and I don't remember who all were on that work detail.

02-00:57:43 Berglund Sokolov: That's Lindy Blake and Ricky Dodd?

02-00:57:45 Mather: Right. Who are both now deceased. And they were freaked out. They couldn't believe it. They were just blown away.

02-00:57:57 Berglund Sokolov: How did they tell people? How did they come in with that?

02-00:57:59 Mather: Oh. Oh, they were devastated. They were absolutely just like drained. You could see it—just pale. And they were happy to get back in the jail.

02-00:58:10 Berglund Sokolov: Was there any official announcement made about what happened to Richard?

02-00:58:15 Mather: There was, but it wasn't like an official announcement. It was an invitation from the minister that they had assigned to the stockade, for us to have some kind of a service, or something, over there.

02-00:58:31 Berglund Sokolov: Was that that day?

02-00:58:34 Mather: I think it was on the weekend. I think. I don't remember exactly what day it was. But probably a day or two they had to get—there was a lot of upsettedness, so they had to do something. It had to be like the evening of the eleventh or the twelfth, or something, because here we were coming right up on the next day.

02-00:59:00 Berglund Sokolov: What happened to Richard?

02-00:59:06 Mather: Well, okay. They shot him in the back at about thirty paces, maybe thirty, forty feet, and he didn't live long.

02-00:59:20 Berglund Sokolov: Did he die on the spot?

02-00:59:21 Mather: Yeah, yeah, he was dead on the spot. [sighing] After they killed him, and everybody came back in the stockade from that detail, everybody was

stressed. Everybody was big-time stressed. They were putting us in our cells early. They were only letting small groups to go to chow. Everything was getting suppressed like that.

02-00:59:47 Berglund Sokolov: How did people, your fellow prisoners react to this? Was it surprise? Were you shocked? Was it expected?

02-01:00:02 Mather: The shooting, the shooting?

02-01:00:03 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-01:00:04 Mather: Oh, we were shocked. We were unbelievably shocked—like what? We're not dangerous. What the? Really? We were pissed off; we were angry. You killed him? That little guy? You know, I didn't know him well at all, but he was the type of guy that was like a neighbor, you know, that was just a good kid who had nice parents, who lived in the country, who basically had probably a good life, good education, good elementary school and high school education. And he got killed by his own people for wanting to go home. So you know, that's my story. I don't know, the Army probably has a different one.

02-01:00:58 Berglund Sokolov: How did you start processing or coming to terms with what had happened to him?

02-01:01:05 Mather: I think we got angry. I think we just went to anger and outrage, and all that that I have mentioned. We did a few things inside the stockade. We did every—all the damage we could to—

02-01:01:16 Berglund Sokolov: Tell us about that. Tell us about that.

02-01:01:16 Mather: We pulled wires out of the walls. We pulled. There was a squawk box up on the landing to call for different prisoners, so we pulled that, ripped it off the wall. And just generally—I think we got—one guy maybe burned, he tried to set some mattresses on fire. Broke some windows inside the upstairs area and things like that, just a minor, minor disturbance, really. A few people got put into solitary. There was all this going on.

02-01:01:49 Berglund Sokolov: Did you know the guard who shot Richard?

02-01:01:50 Mather: No. No. He didn't even work inside. He was only a prisoner-chaser on the outside. He was an MP. Well, the story is he may have returned from Vietnam shortly before this all occurred, so we don't know that—I don't know that. I think it cuts him a little too much slack actually, but yeah.

02-01:02:23 Berglund Sokolov: So Richard gets shot and killed on October 11, 1968.

02-01:02:29 Mather: Mm-hmm.

02-01:02:33 Berglund Sokolov: How does the organizing, of what ends up being called the Presidio Mutiny, start to happen?

02-01:02:42 Mather: Well, there was some discussion about—among the lefties, you know, the guys that were there: me, Walter, a few others. But Randy had come in on the twelfth, and with Randy—when he came in, Randy Rowland—when he came in there was a call from the movement to do something, I mean like it would be good if we could do something. We'll get the press up here, and we'll try to get the word out to them. We could try to do something to protest his killing and other things.

02-01:03:15 Berglund Sokolov: There was kind of a strange confluence of events, correct? There was Richard's killing followed by an already planned massive anti-Vietnam war—

02-01:03:27 Mather: GI-organized.

02-01:03:27 Berglund Sokolov: Right. Involving GIs, and for the first time really showing the level of GI dissent, which ends up at the Presidio gates.

02-01:03:40 Mather: That's true.

02-01:03:40 Berglund Sokolov: And Randy turning himself in.

02-01:03:41 Mather: Right.

02-01:03:42 Berglund Sokolov: In a very dramatic way.

02-01:03:44 Mather: Yeah, and they tossed him in with us. Perfect. He brought in all this encouraging hope. As you know, he has excitability and some drive. And so with that, he talked to me and Walter and a few others, and we just embraced him right away, because we knew what he was doing. We're on the same page, all of us, right? So we said, "Okay, fine. What's the plan? We need to do something. We need to do something." I said, "Okay, well, the only thing we can do, we can't do it in here. The only thing we can do is do it out there, because that way the cameras can see us, so we'll do it out there. So how do we get everybody together on this?" Well, then we figure out when they call—let everybody go to chow in the morning. We've got to fall out in the morning, and then fall back in for chow. After chow you go upstairs for a while, use the restroom, whatever you've got to do, and then you've got to fall back out for work detail at a certain time. When they call the first name for the work detail, it's time for us to start walking over to the grassy area where we're going to sit down, and we've got a list of grievances, and Walter said he'd be happy to read them.

02-01:04:56 Berglund Sokolov: Who wrote them?

02-01:04:58 Mather: We all did. We all did. We got together. It was about the war, about the conditions in the stockade, about Richard, his killing. We want an investigation; we want psychological evaluations of all the guards and all the prisoners. Just really simple stuff. So we, with that list—I wish I had that list actually.

02-01:05:22 Berglund Sokolov: Does anybody have that list?

02-01:05:22 Mather: I have no idea. I have no idea. I don't even know if Walter would remember everything if you asked him. [laughing] But it was pretty simple, pretty down to earth. It couldn't be too long. We wanted them to understand us. Once that happened—we were out there, we did get out there and were able to establish a perimeter, a little circle of guys, and Walter could stand in the middle, a little protected, and read the list. At the same time, the captain was coming up or was there, and he was getting prepared to read us the Mutiny Act, and Walter read the grievances. And then they read the Mutiny Act and we didn't move, and they ordered the guards in. We were only out there, I don't know—we couldn't have been out there more than an hour or so, you know?

02-01:06:33 Berglund Sokolov: Where did the idea to sing come from?

02-01:06:37 Mather: Of the what?

02-01:06:37 Berglund Sokolov: Of the singing.

02-01:06:40 Mather: Well, it was spontaneous, because we didn't know that they were going to read us the Mutiny Act, but our logic was if we can't hear them, maybe they can't charge us for this, so we started singing so we couldn't hear them.

02-01:06:54 Berglund Sokolov: What about the locking of—?

02-01:06:55 Mather: It was being filmed at the same time, right?

02-01:06:58 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, and what about being filmed by the Army?

02-01:07:02 Mather: Yeah, and where are those films?

02-01:07:03 Berglund Sokolov: We know that photographs were taken at the time.

02-01:07:05 Mather: Right, exactly.

02-01:07:06 Berglund Sokolov: Army photographs. You sat in a circle, with Walter standing in the middle, and you linked arms.

02-01:07:14 Mather: In a lot of cases we'd do that.

02-01:07:15 Berglund Sokolov: What did the linking of arms signify?

02-01:07:17 Mather: It was just made us feel better, number one. [laughing] I think it was just touching somebody else, being there in solidarity with other people who agreed to do this and to take whatever consequences came with it.

02-01:07:33 Berglund Sokolov: Did it have any significance for you that the Nine—the other people who had come in with the Nine for Peace—did not join you in the protest?

02-01:07:42 Mather: I was a little disappointed, but in retrospect I totally get it, you know? They had done their thing. They had done their deal. I was in a different—I was in a difference space, different space.

02-01:07:56 Berglund Sokolov: How come?

02-01:07:57 Mather: I felt that our job was to constantly do it, you know? Not just resist out there, but resist in here, resist there. You've got to keep this rolling. You going to be rolled over, once they get the best of you? No, I'm not going to do that. I don't care. It probably wasn't the wisest thing I've ever done, but I have a lot of regret now.

02-01:08:21 Berglund Sokolov: What kind of regret?

02-01:08:23 Mather: Oh, that I didn't do what I was going to do earlier would be one of them. Maybe when I was in Canada, in 1967, I just would have stayed, parked my butt there and not come back. But I didn't have the sophistication at all to figure all that out. I was barely ready to leave home, as far as I was concerned.

02-01:08:42 Berglund Sokolov: What about the black guys who were in the stockade?

02-01:08:47 Mather: Yeah, well—

02-01:08:50 Berglund Sokolov: When the Twenty-Seven happened?

02-01:08:51 Mather: Yeah. We approached the black community inside the stockade and asked them—didn't ask them to participate. We asked them if they would participate, you know, like that. They said based on the fact that—three or four things. Number one, if they did it, they were going to never see the light of day, and there was a white guy that got killed, right? Okay, that's another issue, although they were pissed too and they didn't want to go out either. But they didn't use that as a reason—that's my reason. But I think overall it was just like, it wasn't so much their fight. They were on a different trajectory. They were already downtrodden, many of them, and then they get in the military even further subjected to hierarchical discipline and all this. And so now they're in jail. Well, you know, do you want to go to jail longer? [laughing] Because that's all there is.

02-01:09:58 Berglund Sokolov: Do you now, or did you then, see yourself as one of the leaders of the Presidio 27? Or how did you see the leadership?

02-01:10:10 Mather: I was one of the organizers. I was one of the organizers of the Presidio 27. I thought about the word lead, you know, and I'm somewhat uncomfortable with it in some ways. I would say I was [a source of] information about what was going on in the outside, just like Randy was. When I came in I brought in all this information. All these other demonstrations were happening, all

these people, all the stories about Joan Baez coming and singing to me—us, with her husband David Harris, coming and speaking eloquently about right where we were at.

02-01:10:52 Berglund Sokolov: With the Nine for Peace.

02-01:10:53 Mather: With the Nine for Peace, exactly. So there was so much—

02-01:10:58 Berglund Sokolov: And your regular visits were also conduits of information.

02-01:11:00 Mather: Exactly, and so I was already organizing; I was already doing all that long before Randy came in—long before anybody—I had the only access. I was the chain.

02-01:11:14 Berglund Sokolov: And you had been there for four months.

02-01:11:16 Mather: Yeah. I helped to get people attorneys. I helped get messages out to people that called my mother, you know, things like that, and tried to get them visits, the people that didn't, who were too far away to visit. What I'd do is I'd get the name of a woman to come in and visit him as his fiancée, and they'd do the paperwork and then he'd get a visit. And it was a woman. It was great. [laughter] Well, no, really, a lot of women would come in and visit. People do that today too, you know?

02-01:11:52 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

02-01:11:53 Mather: People, supporters of the Nine for Peace, moved to Leavenworth and lived there and visited those guys while they were in Leavenworth. That's the level of commitment that there was on the left around that kind of thing. Pretty good, you know? We had the best of that, as far as I'm concerned. At the same time we were in the belly of the beast, we were held in warm arms by our people. So that's that, you know? I'm still in touch with a lot of those same people. I'm still in touch with Adrienne. We're talking a lot these days. It's a big picture when you start looking at it from the perspective of one of the participants.

02-01:12:57 Berglund Sokolov: How did it feel to sit down out there on the lawn?

02-01:13:04 Mather: [pause to think] That's a really good question. I think once the decision was made to break ranks, and people did, then there was a sense of—we did it.

We're here, now what's going to happen? Hopefully the press shows up, hopefully this will happen, hopefully this will happen. But either way, we're going to read these grievances and we're going to do this, and it's not just for Richard—it's for us, for every single one of us—and others too. This is important. I think getting out there and being scared to death, full of emotion, full of righteousness too, because we felt like we had a right to do it. We had to protest a fellow soldier, fellow prisoner's murder, as far as we were concerned. There was not a way to assuage that. There was really no way. We had to do something to be able to gain that kind of feeling, that we didn't give in or didn't let them roll over us, okay? Even when the minister invited us for a ceremony of some kind—whatever you want to call it—he said how unfortunate it was, and then he also then called it a justifiable homicide.

02-01:14:49 Berglund Sokolov: Did you go to that service? Was there a service?

02-01:14:51 Mather: I was there. It was in a building like this. Yeah, I think it was only two chairs went through the windows.

02-01:14:59 Berglund Sokolov: So people—

02-01:14:59 Mather: You're going to tell us it's—lure us in here and then tell us—fuck you, sky pilot, you know? That was the end of his period of time as being a trusted minister, around us.

02-01:15:18 Berglund Sokolov: What happened right after the mutiny?

02-01:15:24 Mather: Well, they threw me in solitary, but they pulled a lot of people out and took them upstairs, even though we had never left the yard. They did a strip search.

02-01:15:39 Berglund Sokolov: Of everyone.

02-01:15:40 Mather: Right, yeah, and I think I took off my uniform again for a minute, and then put it back on and didn't want to deal with it anymore. But there was a lot of frustrating times right then. People didn't know what was going to happen, how it was going to go. But one thing about it; we were pretty happy we did it, at that time. And I think probably—maybe in the cell in Leavenworth you'd think twice about what you just did.

02-01:16:12 Berglund Sokolov: Now, you didn't know, when you made the decision with Walter and the others, to take this action of sitting down in the yard, you didn't know that you were going to be charged with mutiny?

02-01:16:24 Mather: No.

02-01:16:26 Berglund Sokolov: How did it feel as that rolled out?

02-01:16:29 Mather: Well, we didn't even know, really, what the mutiny thing meant, when they were doing it. We knew it was going to be worse than refusing a direct order, but we didn't really know. We only found out after the lawyers advised us. This could have been, if it was a state of war, you could be shot, it could be the firing squad or hang you.

02-01:16:55 Berglund Sokolov: Why do you think they charged you with mutiny?

02-01:16:58 Mather: Stanley Larsen, the commanding general at the time—this was his jurisdiction— wanted to set an example. He had some kind of crazy notion that this was the beginning of the revolution, and that he needed to [making rapping sounds] stamp it out. We were the guys, so that's what he did. Even in the Article 32 board, the prosecutor was advising that this be reduced to a simple summary court-martial or even an Article 15, because it's not worth it. But he wasn't listened to, and they pushed forward. These young guys, you know, were given almost as much time as they were on the planet already. How do you wrap your head around that?

02-01:17:53 Berglund Sokolov: What were the early sentences?

02-01:17:56 Mather: Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years for a nonviolent demonstration within a stockade. You weren't really influencing many people with that when you did it. The fallout from this trial, however, [laughing] created what you know now.

02-01:18:17 Berglund Sokolov: Do you see the [Presidio] 27 and the way the charge of mutiny kind of escalated the action in the public as a spark for the larger GI movement that was happening before and then continues to happen after this action?

02-01:18:37 Mather: Yeah, I think so. I would agree with your statement. For me it was like— when I first got up to Canada—we can talk about the escape in a minute, whenever you want me to. But the thing is that when I first got up to

Canada—"Oh, you left, eh? Oh, okay." Americans that I talked to, I'd tell them where I was, when I left, what I was involved in, and one guy said to me, "You weren't one of the Presidio 27, were you?" I said, "Yeah, I was." You know, so it was vibrating everywhere. These demonstrations were vibrating through the left, vibrating through the peace movement. More people were going AWOL constantly. Hundreds of thousands of people went AWOL.

02-01:19:33 Berglund Sokolov: Had you heard about Ronald Lockman when you were here? Or did you know about his case?

02-01:19:38 Mather: I was educated, yeah, I was educated to a certain degree about whatever resisters had done, whatever they had done, that there were other groups that had done things, but I wasn't aware of that prior to this. Ronald Lockman—I actually stayed in a guy's house, a couple's house down in San Carlos, whose son sailed a canoe with an outrigger and a sail out to stop the fleet. The kind of little things that people were doing on their own. He was a Berkeley student.

02-01:20:17 Berglund Sokolov: Just kind of getting in the way.

02-01:20:19 Mather: Yeah, well, just kind of getting out there, and the only boat, and now we've got the peace Navy can go out there. There's all these large boats full of Americans in Australia, and it's going to Gaza—right now. So one boat has already been attacked by the Israelis in international waters. Yeah, it's just great. I digress.

Yeah, the mutiny thing, and the effects of the trial, and the effects that it had on the GI movement, because it was a GI entity, was big, I think. For me, it was just pivotal in life. All this was just very, very, very pivotal.

02-01:21:06 Berglund Sokolov: Do you want to talk a little bit about where your head was at the moment of the mutiny and how you were seeing it just kind of in terms of yourself?

02-01:21:17 Mather: Well, I was thrilled, I think, really, that we had an opportunity to do something like that in the stockade, because I had done this thing with the Nine, where we had had cameras, and we had all these ministers around protecting us, and so forth, and so on. Based on that, and based on these other actions that I had witnessed and been told about, we decided that we could do something like a little sit-down, and that would be enough to piss them off, and we could read our list of grievances—and at least we'd done something. We'd made a statement. We're not going to change much; we

figured that out. But we could do it—we could do something. This guy just got killed. We could do something, okay? I think we all felt that way.

A lot of guys didn't want to get involved, and we convinced a lot of guys too. I felt bad about that for years, that I helped convince people or encouraged them to participate, and then I escaped. I had my own bit of survivor guilt as time went on, until they were all out of prison. I knew it when I was in that box; I had some guilt. But I didn't after that, and don't now. 02-01:22:42 Berglund Sokolov: So tell us about how the decision making around your escape happened?

02-01:22:47 Mather: Okay.

02-01:22:52 Berglund Sokolov: How the plan rolled out, how you're thinking about escaping rather than doing the time that you already had for the Nine at that point?

02-01:23:05 Mather: Right, right. I didn't know what these guys were going to—what they were going to do to these guys, to us, for the mutiny. I had no idea. If you can imagine me being in Vancouver and getting the news about how much time they got. I dropped to my knees, for sure. I couldn't believe it. It was crushing. But I had to let go of my own guilt. Walter and I had talked long about it—we had an agreement, all of us, all of the [Presidio] 27. If you could escape, you should. Take away anything you can from them. And so we did. We chose to. And people knew we were going as soon as we could. We were looking out there. We weren't looking anywhere else. [laughing]

02-01:24:00 Berglund Sokolov: You knew that you already had time, and that this was just going to make it worse?

02-01:24:09 Mather: Yeah, and I also knew that I had a small segment of time to make this decision, because I would be shipped out to Leavenworth once this other trial was over, and that it was just the beginning of—not even to trial yet, still in the Article 32 period when I left. It might have been going to trial, but it hadn't started.

02-01:24:27 Berglund Sokolov: And you had completed your trial for the Nine?

02-01:24:30 Mather: Right.

02-01:24:31 Berglund Sokolov: That completed in November. So the [Presidio] 27 happens in October. You're tried for the Nine in November, with the [Presidio] 27 hanging over you.

02-01:24:42 Mather: Looming.

02-01:24:44 Berglund Sokolov: And their knowledge that you had also participated in that action, right?

02-01:24:48 Mather: Right.

02-01:24:50 Berglund Sokolov: Do you want to talk a little bit about the trial?

02-01:24:54 Mather: I wasn't ever tried. I escaped before the trial started. I have no experience— the only part of the Article 32 board hearing, which is a preliminary hearing prior to the court-martial taking place, or being even judged that it should take place, that's the only time I was there, in the Article 32 hearings. I never was tried; I never was convicted. I never was tried for escape, never was convicted.

02-01:25:23 Berglund Sokolov: What about the Nine for Peace charges?

02-01:25:25 Mather: I was convicted of refusing a direct order and desertion.

02-01:25:28 Berglund Sokolov: And that was in November?

02-01:25:31 Mather: Yeah, November 4, I believe.

02-01:25:34 Berglund Sokolov: What was it like standing trial for those charges?

02-01:25:38 Mather: Well, the trial lasted to the end of the fourth day. That's a long general court- martial. Usually they're a few hours, okay? I had a lot of lawyers, as I mentioned, and witnesses. I was on the stand one entire day, a grueling eight hour, almost seven-hour period of questions, like a ping-pong ball. I think, in a sense, I convicted myself for refusing a direct order, because they asked, the court asked me, "If you had been given a uniform, would you have put it on?" I said, "No." [laughing] Yeah, I kind of knew that was going to cost me, but I had to say no. You know, if you succumb to their ploys, they win automatically. I didn't want to give them anything, and I made the best of the situation, you know? I mean, I really did. I figured I had done the most damage I could do, and the most help I could give already. Me sitting in a cell for the next decade isn't going to do anything for anybody, really, so it was a simple decision: I think I need to get out of here.

02-01:27:07 Berglund Sokolov: And you were sentenced to—?

02-01:27:11 Mather: I could have gotten eight years; I got four years.

02-01:27:12 Berglund Sokolov: Four.

02-01:27:14 Mather: And a dishonorable discharge at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. That was my sentence.

02-01:27:20 Berglund Sokolov: How were you treated as you were transported to and from the room where the trial was held, and can you tell us where the trial was held as well?

02-01:27:33 Mather: Yeah, I think I'm just going to roll over here and look—yeah, the second—I think it's this street or the next one over. I can't remember the name of the street. But it's a dry cleaners now; you may know it. I was walked down to the stockade the morning of my court-martial. It's very interesting. Normally they don't do that. Why would they walk me down, with a guy who had a .45 on his hip? Think they were trying to intimidate me a little bit the day of my court-martial? It was really, really awful. But in any case, I was in handcuffs, and I walked all the way down here with a guard behind me. This is after they'd killed Richard Bunch, and we'd had the mutiny and all this other stuff, so it's kind of like holy cow. And this was the same guard, this guy Cohen—a Jewish guy, right?, who would come to the stockade, came in one morning and said, "God, last night I had dreams I was putting you guys in ovens." I was [like], "Oh, thanks for sharing." He was kind of twisted, but he also gave me, at one point in time, a ride around the post in a van. He said, "Oh yeah, the firing pin on my .45 is really not working very well." I'm going, "Yeah, fuck you." Sorry, I had to say that. But you know, it was like he dragged me on the outside of the post near the gate, near the fence, and I was like, "Yeah." So after that, I decided that the guards weren't safe, especially outside, and so I didn't want to go out anymore unless I was on my own. The day they read the Mutiny Act Cohen was there, and our captain was there, and all the guards were there, and it changed everything. It just changed everything. I actually had noncommissioned officers and officers speaking to me as a man, as opposed to a prisoner.

02-01:29:55 Berglund Sokolov: How was that different?

02-01:29:57 Mather: Well, I think that I gained some—somehow gained some credibility with these guys because I didn't put up with them. They kind of saw where I was at and—leave me alone kind of thing.

02-01:30:10 Berglund Sokolov: Were all the prisoners in the stockade enlisted men, or draftees?

02-01:30:15 Mather: Yeah, they were draftees, or maybe they enlisted and then decided it wasn't the best idea and they needed to go home for some reason. It happens all the time, you know.

02-01:30:24 Berglund Sokolov: There weren't any officers in the stockade?

02-01:30:27 Mather: No. Not that I know of. Normally they wouldn't put an officer in the stockade with all those guys, probably wouldn't do that. Would probably put him under house arrest or something. The cohesiveness we gained was over time. It wasn't just a day; it was over time.

02-01:30:58 Berglund Sokolov: What did it mean to you to be part of the [Presidio] 27, at that moment what did that mean for you? How has that changed over time, the same?

02-01:31:14 Mather: A huge question really, because I felt so many things. Steve Reese asked me the same question, and I told him I was going to go up there and sit and maybe find out how I felt, you know?

02-01:31:33 Berglund Sokolov: When were you talking with Steve Reese?

02-01:31:35 Mather: Oh, years ago.

02-01:31:36 Berglund Sokolov: Years ago.

02-01:31:36 Mather: Years ago. I was supposed to write up something on every—and when it went to his page, my words would come up, and I didn't do it. I just got wrapped up in too many other things, and I think I didn't want to. I think I didn't want to recreate it. Yeah, leave my memory alone, kind of thing.

But the best part is that we were, if you look at some of those photos, we were smiling. We were smiling; we were singing; we were together. We formed a group, a segment that stood together. Has anybody ever had that happen to them? Almost spontaneously, because of a tragedy you bond together with almost thirty people, and it costs them years of their lives? It's pretty huge for young guys, in their lives. I don't know how it has affected everybody else, but I only have an idea. But I think most of us survived it, and one of the reasons we did is because of what we did. We're proud of it. It's something we can stand on and go yeah, that's right. Whatever it cost us,

that's just the price of admission. [laughing] There's nothing you can do about that. It's way too late. I just think there's so much good work going on now around this reunion, celebration—whatever it's going to be called ultimately.

02-01:33:21 Berglund Sokolov: What do you want people to remember about the Presidio 27? And then we'll go back to your escape. But what do you want people to remember about it, and to learn about it?

02-01:33:32 Mather: Sure. I would ask a big question—what do you think these men had to gain by this demonstration, you know? Really. I think it was our own self-respect, respect for Richard—an unbelievable tragedy, didn't deserve it. None of us did. None of us deserved any of this, any of this. It was just one more level of outrage. People were saying screw it. How much is going to go on? We've got to do something. We were hoping the press would show up; we were hoping it would make a big splash. It didn't. They didn't show up, or they were stopped, or whatever the real story is. But ultimately, the news got out, and like the next day they were at the gates too. So it's a big deal. The city was pretty hot, pretty wound up.

02-01:34:52 Berglund Sokolov: Do you think it's a piece of history that's been forgotten?

02-01:34:59 Mather: Well, like most history of the resistance to the war in Vietnam, it's been forgotten, been suppressed, unwelcome—all kinds of different things. In the film Sir! No Sir! they talk about that. They talk about all the myths and all the things that went on that were never talked about, never reported. People now, all over the world, really have very little history about the Vietnam War, the resistance to the Vietnam War—or much else about that war, because there's just not a lot being taught, but that's its own issue.

02-01:35:47 Berglund Sokolov: I think we're getting ready to wrap up for today.

02-01:35:50 Mather: Okay.

02-01:35:51 Berglund Sokolov: But one final question, and then we'll pick up for next time again. What did you learn about yourself by being part of the Presidio 27?

02-01:36:04 Mather: Well, for me I think it solidified previous feelings that I was a bit of a rebel. I had problems with my dad; I had problems with the school; I had problems with the law—but I wasn't a bad kid. I didn't hurt nobody and wasn't mean. I just was rebellious. For me, being with the Nine and being with the [Presidio] 27 was an extension of who I already was. You know, I mean I

wouldn't put up with much. I wasn't nonviolent—I mean, I was nonviolent. I was not a pacifist, still not a pacifist. But I used to get in street fights; I used to look for them. But that lost its attraction as I got a little bit older, out of high school probably. I'm not going to call myself a badass, because I wasn't one, but I was pretending to be one—let's put it like that, and wanting that persona. But once that kind of went away, I slowly looked around and remembered my religious teaching, remembered—I read Gandhi, I read as much as I could to try to understand the path of non-violence. What are we going to do—Martin Luther King, the whole civil rights movement. I was seeing it every day on TV, seeing the war on TV. Robert Kennedy was shot while I was AWOL. You know, so it's like, I watched them land on the moon, up in Canada, you know? This puts things in perspective. This was a long time ago, and I feel lucky to be sitting here telling you the story, to tell you the truth.

02-01:38:27 Berglund Sokolov: Great. Anything else you want to add before we turn things off?

02-01:38:34 Mather: Give me a second. You asked me an earlier question about—you kind of leaned on one area—were there leaders? Well, sure, there were leaders, but they weren't as important as the people that went with them, you know? Every one of us had to take a step. That was a big step, and it affected the rest of our lives. I give them all equal credit.

02-01:39:23 Berglund Sokolov: Great, thank you.

02-01:39:23 Mather: Sure. Thank you guys.

Interview 3: August 16, 2018

03-00:00:11 Berglund Sokolov: This is Barbara Berglund Sokolov with Keith Mather at the Presidio of San Francisco. It is August 17, 2018, and this is our third session of recording around Keith's involvement in the Presidio 27 and the Nine for Peace, and his four-month confinement in the Presidio stockade. Today we're going to start with a little bit about your trial for your activities with the Nine for Peace, which happens on November 4, 1968, just shortly after the mid- October Presidio 27 sit-down action at the stockade. So Keith, do you want to share some of your memories of the trial?

03-00:01:10 Mather: Yeah, sure. I think I talked last time about being walked down from the stockade. I just wanted to make sure that was in there, which was strange. Yeah, and I was taken in, and I had called Jack Robinson as a witness. Jack Robinson was one of the Nine for Peace, and he was confined in Treasure Island brig. I called him as a witness to get him out.

03-00:01:34 Berglund Sokolov: Was he confined at Treasure Island because he was from another branch of the military?

03-00:01:38 Mather: He was a Marine. Yeah, he was a Marine. They were being really hard on him, and we knew that because we had people in touch with him. I got him out, and I got him out for several days. They brought him in one day—the first day they brought him in he was in ratty fatigues, all sweaty. They had just put him through all kinds of PT and all kinds of stuff, and then brought him as a witness. That's why he came back the second day, because they said, "You take him back, get him cleaned up. You put him in class A uniform and you bring him here at this hour." That was decent. So he got out for two days, and we were really happy about that, but the process of the trial was I had an abundance of attorneys that I've already spoken about, and supporters filled the courtroom. My parents were there. I remember my dad had had a tooth pulled, and there he was sitting in the courtroom. I think I called about ten witnesses. Some of the guards I called, some of the other prisoners I called, some of the other guys that I was involved with, and like I said, Jack Robinson.

03-00:02:57 Berglund Sokolov: Did you have, in terms of your interaction with the attorneys—you're saying that you called these witnesses?

03-00:03:03 Mather: Right.

03-00:03:04 Berglund Sokolov: Did you have a lot of agency in how the trial would proceed, in terms of your interaction with your legal counsel?

03-00:03:14 Mather: Yeah, I wasn't necessarily telling them what to do, or anything like that, but I was clear with them that I wasn't going to change my tune, and so they had to deal with that. They had to deal with the fact that I was going to answer questions honestly. I wasn't going to answer them with any contrived notion, or anything like that, to try to get around anything. I hadn't done that so far; I wasn't going to start in my trial. That would be kind of disrespecting the whole spirit of this, and not very helpful anyway.

03-00:03:51 Berglund Sokolov: What were you being officially charged with at this point?

03-00:03:55 Mather: Refusing a direct order from an officer and desertion. That's being absent without leave for over thirty days, and they drop you from the rolls, and you're considered a deserter at that point in time.

03-00:04:07 Berglund Sokolov: What was the direct order that you refused?

03-00:04:09 Mather: To wear the uniform, to put it on. Because I took it off, and I wouldn't put it back on.

03-00:04:15 Berglund Sokolov: Which happened at the stockade.

03-00:04:19 Mather: At the stockade, yeah. That was like October, and you can see how that— during my confinement period the only periods of time I had a uniform on were really the first days and the last seven weeks, or something like that, ten weeks—whatever it was. I became a novelty, put it that way, in the jail, not wearing the uniform. There were other people—

03-00:04:59 Berglund Sokolov: And wearing your blanket.

03-00:05:01 Mather: Yeah, wearing their blanket.

03-00:05:02 Berglund Sokolov: Their blanket.

03-00:05:03 Mather: They had U.S. stamped on it, and I turned it around toward the inside, so nobody had to look at it, because we were just—in every possible way—we were resisting. In every possible way we were pushing back to them, like the

guys who'd cut the tongues out of their boots and make little leather stash bags for whatever. They'd make the bag, whatever, but it was just a way of—because there were no tasks, you know, anything like that, that were artistic or anything, so we'd try to do what we could do. It was just a brutal environment.

03-00:05:40 Berglund Sokolov: The trial.

03-00:05:41 Mather: Yeah, the trial. I think the second day I was called to the stand, but I was called in the afternoon of the first day, just to establish everything and then I was to return. We called all our witnesses, ministers, father and mother, people who'd known me a long time—Frank Canale, a friend of the family who'd known me since I was this high. He came in and told all about me, you know, and just trying to set it up as a character type of a situation, and they were trying to do an honorable thing in an honorable way, upfront and wasn't trying to—it was very clear and respectful with the officer. We said this is all about the war. We couldn't even get that in, because they would stop us every time.

I was on the stand one day for, the second day, for almost eight hours with two breaks. And it wasn't going well. [laughing] I could kind of sense that. You could see the jurists, the majors and colonels that were going to judge me. They're certainly not peers. You could see them making notes every once in a while, at certain times, and you could kind of gauge what they were doing. All of the attorneys had a shot; Terry Hallinan was great. He was pushing them and objecting, and just fighting the whole time, and being supported by all these—but and then watching the military lawyers kind of going ehhhhhh—a little bit cautious, because they really couldn't be as forceful as they wanted to be with superior officers in the court. They couldn't do it. They had to work with these people, right? So it was interesting. It was this little balancing act that was going on.

03-00:07:45 Berglund Sokolov: Was there press coverage?

03-00:07:47 Mather: There was press coverage, actually. There was usually press there in the beginning. They weren't allowed in the courtroom, but there was drawings that were made for the newspapers, or whatever—stock images that they already had had. So for me it was like, I knew I was going to be found guilty. That's kind of the deal in the military. If you go to court-martial, guess what? You're guilty. And very rarely do you ever see—and only on appeal, eighteen months later, will you see whether or not you can get a break. Just kind of guilty [bangs once on table] and then let somebody else deal with it. That way we've done our job and made ourselves look good. They have all kinds of people up there, people from the movement, and so

forth, that were really articulate and really put it forward and answered the questions correctly and were forthright to the prosecution, and everything else. It was a four-day court-martial. That's a long court-martial for these kind of charges.

03-00:08:59 Berglund Sokolov: Which were pretty simple charges.

03-00:09:01 Mather: Pretty simple charges. Usually they go [raps twice on table]. See ya. But they were on—see they were—I was in a show. This was public. But they were in a show too. It was kind of like they had their own agenda and their own—they had some skin in the game, if you know what I mean.

03-00:09:23 Berglund Sokolov: It sounds like these trials were kind of becoming referendums on issues around the war, on the movement versus the military, that it was a bigger issue than just Keith Mather being charged with two offenses.

03-00:09:43 Mather: Well, yeah. I mean, that was the primary reason for all of these demonstrations and all of these other things. The fact that we were in the military and going to be forced to fight a war we didn't want to go to, was an impetus for us to get off our asses and do something, or just sit AWOL until you—you know, you're going to go back eventually. You've got to get it settled. It's pretty simple. And if you're going to go back and get it settled, and you think you're going to go to jail for it, and you know the war is wrong, well, why in the hell just don't you do something to—you're going to jail anyway. Something—you know, so—who else is going to—I mean, it's kind of like—it's us! We're in the situation. Who knows it and understands it better than us, and we're here now. We were all in agreement real easily. Yeah, we've got to do something. We were all nervous and everything like that, wondering what our parents would think. But we all made choices.

Toward the end of my court-martial, you could tell—because they were starting to read more law into the record, my lawyers as well as the other ones—that they were setting things up in a primary way for an appeal, which would happen later. Within eighteen months I was told. It came to the end of the trial, and we went into the other room, basically, where I was chain- smoking, waiting for this verdict, because I knew I was guilty. How much time are they going to give me? They could have given me up to eight years—or they could a little more actually—but they ended up giving me four years and a dishonorable discharge. It was the craziest thing, because I was so glad it was over and done with, and I knew—I actually saluted them, which was—you know, why did I do that?

03-00:11:55 Berglund Sokolov: Was it kind of a reflex?

03-00:11:57 Mather: Probably. Yeah, just like, "Okay, that's the verdict? Thanks. I'm done." But it just caught me off guard. Everybody's going, "What's he doing?" While I was there, a cross-the-street neighbor and her sister, they were both teenagers that I went to school with, were there in the courtroom, were there right behind me where I was sitting. It was really nice to see neighbors and friends, and especially young girls, you know? You don't get an opportunity to see too many young women in prison. And she had a lot of sympathy, I think. She took off a leather ring she had on her finger, and she kind of held it out to me, like low, for me to see it, and slipped it on my finger, just like really sweet. It was like, "Here." That was awesome, and I was like, "Oh wow, cool." It meant a lot to me, just that connection, so I assigned some type of value to this ring I guess. Anyway, court-martial, guilty, leather ring, go back to jail. They say, "Okay, get in the chow line. You're coming back. Time for chow. Get in the chow line. We want to feed you." I got down in the chow line, and this sergeant came up to me and started giving me a hard time. I just got back from getting court-martialed, okay? Just got sentenced to four years. He was saying, "What's that unnecessary civilian jewelry?" And started to get in my shit. I wasn't gonna get no more charges, so I just laid down in the chow line, right there. Yeah, he kicked me a couple—they hit me and beat me a little bit. It wasn't too bad.

03-00:14:00 Berglund Sokolov: Sat down in that basement floor of the stockade?

03-00:14:01 Mather: Yeah, right. Right in the chow line. Before you enter the mess hall itself, that's where we were, just below the stairs. I actually wrote a poem about it. I don't have it with me, but it was basically—the onset of it was that—thank you for the ring. Thank you. That was like a spiritual kind of a connection, and I didn't let it go. I didn't give up. In some way, I held on to that, and it was meaningful. I wrote that, and then somehow I got the address of one of the girls somehow, and so I mailed it off. Well, the return was great, because she said, "Well, I was in altered states a lot during those times, and I don't really remember a great deal. But I'm glad to hear the story." [laughter] It arrived on my birthday, and I thought that was cool.

03-00:15:00 Berglund Sokolov: How much later did you send her the letter?

03-00:15:03 Mather: Oh, probably, I think, forty years later. [laughing] So it's just like that, you know, it just—this stuff that's like beneath the surface is—it still has life.

03-00:15:27 Berglund Sokolov: Did you get to keep the ring, or did they take it?

03-00:15:27 Mather: Oh no—I don't have any idea. I mean it's just like pffft. More than likely, they took it. But I didn't give it up, you know?

03-00:15:37 Berglund Sokolov: What about other things that happened at the trial with—?

03-00:15:41 Mather: And I also wrote in there, I wanted—and the reason I wrote it; I wanted her to know.

03-00:15:45 Berglund Sokolov: How much it had meant to you.

03-00:15:47 Mather: Well, that I didn't let go. Anyway, that was nice, and we're still friends, so that's good.

03-00:15:57 Berglund Sokolov: Other things that happened at your trial with supporters? Different ways that they might have shown their support?

03-00:16:05 Mather: Well, just being there. You know, I had a lot of friends from high school there, and periodically—not for every day, but a couple of people—Bob Ganong he was there every day. My friend Tony Lenzini came. His sister came. Neighbors came. Everybody was concerned, and cared. I had a lot of support from the movement, so there were a lot of women in the movement that were—well, okay—groupies, if you will, for the activists, in a little bit of a way, just cluster around us and protect us. Like, when I escaped, they made up a little packet of nice soap, and just something sweet and nice.

But at the end of my trial, when I saluted these people sitting up there, and I was taken out of the room shortly after that, with my attorneys, and there was an MP in there with us. The trial is over, and we heard a commotion, and they held us in the room and wouldn't let us out. These two women—I have their names, but not with me—out of their purses they took like squeeze bottles, ketchup squeeze bottles of red dye, symbolizing blood and the war. They called the judges murderers, and they were spraying them, the flag, the court record, prosecutors—and they got arrested! [laughing] They went to trial, and they did some time. But that's solidarity, you know? I was going, "Oh, that was so awesome! I wish I would have seen it." [laughter] But that's the kind of stand-up people. They busted a move in a courtroom. That was pretty serious.

Dick York, he was in the Free Church of Berkeley, he went down with several other ministers, down to the city hall I think it was—or the Federal Building. I can't remember which one they did it to, but one with a fountain, and they poured red dye into it—let my people go, or the water shall run red,

you know? They were doing all these symbolic things, and that was clergy and laity. And then we were doing our thing at the Presidio, the people were in the streets, the people in the streets of Oakland—convention. Nixon gets elected, like a couple of weeks after I get convicted, and we've got the mutiny trial to go? [laughing]

03-00:19:13 Berglund Sokolov: How soon after your trial and your conviction did you start to think about escaping?

03-00:19:20 Mather: Well, the whole idea of me putting the uniform back on—they wouldn't try me unless I had it on—made me start thinking that there would be an opportunity then to escape. I was kind of anxious about the trials, and the two things they had now and be involved in for good—and what was going to happen? I had done these things, and I had thought about the thing, but these were impulsive, to a certain degree. They were emotional, timing was important. These things, they had their own life. And I just think that—I lost my train of thought, sorry.

03-00:20:01 Berglund Sokolov: Well, when you went back to the stockade after your trial, did things just kind of go back to normal? The mutiny had happened, your trial happens, you're wearing the uniform, you're going out on work details.

03-00:20:17 Mather: Yeah.

03-00:20:19 Berglund Sokolov: When did the gears start turning about what was going to come next, and what your choices were?

03-00:20:24 Mather: Basically, by putting the uniform back on, I was helping myself. I was getting tried; I was getting convicted. I knew what time I was going to get, and I was also afforded a little more leeway. I could get a few more visits. Everybody was kind of like oh, he's got a uniform back on. We won, boom. The pressure was off of me a little bit, okay? I wasn't so in their face all the time, wearing a blanket. So like, "[making a buzzing sound]." And that's what I wanted to do; I wanted to lull them into believing that I was just going to go to Leavenworth and do my time, and rah-rah. But I wanted out because I knew it would ruin me going to jail for that long—or war, either one. I just said, "I'm going to try to get out of here." And Walter was ready, you know, "When are we going to go?" kind of thing. But the way it worked out was good, but the escape itself was really just repetitive habits, displaying repetitive habits, same old, same old, taking our tools outside the compound and working inside, and we'd always have an escort with us when we were outside with tools, with a weapon. You know, we just kind of lulled

them into believing we were changed somehow, and a lot of people do change when they do get sentenced. The dynamic changes.

03-00:22:05 Berglund Sokolov: How so?

03-00:22:07 Mather: Well, they calm down, number one. They know they're going away. At least they know where, they know what, they know how, and they don't have to stay in that jail. That jail was terrible, and really just a really confined little space to keep that many people. And there was no facilities—there was nothing. You were just in jail. You're looking at walls; that was it. You had to make up your own entertainment. The thing is, is that once I put the uniform back on and was no longer in maximum security—they took me out of maximum security. A brilliant move on their part.

03-00:22:53 Berglund Sokolov: Were you in 1212 at this point?

03-00:22:55 Mather: I was shifted to 1212 after I had been tried, yeah.

03-00:23:00 Berglund Sokolov: That's a building that no longer exists, just for the record.

03-00:23:02 Mather: Exactly, exactly. An old wooden barracks building.

03-00:23:03 Berglund Sokolov: It's been torn down.

03-00:23:07 Mather: Building 1212. I'm trying to rewind. [sighing]

03-00:23:23 Berglund Sokolov: You and Walter, work details.

03-00:23:24 Mather: Yeah, we took our tools out often, to different places. This day, or the day before—the 23rd of December, we went, did it, got out at the gate. The guard let us out to put our tools away. I always carried a little clip board that looked like it was official, and a list of work, and he let us into the little shed that has a little back room that we were going to use to store the tools. Two MP guards rushed in—"What are you two doing in here? You're maximum security. Ah, I'm going to have to give you both a good write-up for not escaping." We went, "Shit." [laughter]

03-00:24:17 Berglund Sokolov: Did you miss your chance?

03-00:24:18 Mather: "No, we're just putting our tools away."

03-00:24:19 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

03-00:24:20 Mather: [sighing] Okay, the next day is Christmas Eve. All those people are gone. All the guys with any seniority are gone, and everybody's home, getting ready. The guys that are from Minneapolis are working and it was cold out. It was chilly, and it was kind of misty like it gets here, and almost raining, borderline, enough to keep the golfers off the course. That I knew. We got out, we went into the shed, and we screwed around in there and made some noise pounding some nails, cut some wood, didn't close the door or anything else, just left it open, ajar. He was standing in the carport around one of these little oil heaters that the Army used.

03-00:25:21 Berglund Sokolov: Walter.

03-00:25:21 Mather: No, no. The guard—

03-00:25:22 Berglund Sokolov: The guard.

03-00:25:22 Mather: —was standing out, out there, the guard himself, and just staying warm, you know? We're in there, and he didn't want to follow us around. He wanted to stay warm, and it's Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve—come on. Everybody's all right, you know? Hey, it's Christmas Eve, no matter if you're a guard or a prisoner, you're trying to elicit some kind of something around that holiday. I think they let down a little bit, didn't worry so much, and we took advantage of that and went out the window and started walking. We realized we shouldn't walk; we should jog, like we're in the Army, side by side, in step, until we got to—we came down, came way down, and then somehow got over to the golf course.

03-00:26:14 Berglund Sokolov: Because you didn't know your way around the Presidio that well.

03-00:26:16 Mather: Not really, not really.

03-00:26:17 Berglund Sokolov: Since you'd been here, you'd been inside most of that time.

03-00:26:20 Mather: Yeah, but I kind of figured it out. But we ended up getting onto the golf course and MPs even drove by. It was pretty weird. But we got to the golf course. There was nobody there. We went to the bottom of—there was a

ditch and then a little hill, and then there was a wall, a stone wall, retaining wall from the outside, for the outside. We climbed it, by just simple—by getting on each other's shoulders and then climbing on top of each other and throwing our jacket, field jacket up and hooking it on the little metal things that are sticking up, and then one of us climbed over the other to get up and then climbed out. It was kind of quick, but we were way out of shape, and we had this—remember running and you get a splinter in your side, that kind of thing? That was going on, and we were going, "Oh, how much can we do?" And then we got off-post, and I had a twenty-dollar bill in my boot, and we caught a cab, and that was a good feeling, to get off the street anyway. We got dropped off near my friend Adrienne Fong, who was listed as my fiancée. It was not the perfect place to go, probably, but we went there and we stayed there maybe four hours, and then we were moved.

03-00:27:58 Berglund Sokolov: What did it feel like, at the moment of doing that, getting out the window?

03-00:28:10 Mather: Hey, well, for me—

03-00:28:12 Berglund Sokolov: Can you put your finger on that?

03-00:28:15 Mather: Yeah, I can, in a few ways. For me, when I was a kid, I used to sneak out the window to go out, when I wanted to go out, and I'd sneak back in the window and get back in. [laughing] I could just go in between buildings and go in. So it was like—however we can get the hell out of here, I don't really care. We just need not to get hurt doing it. We had a car waiting, showed up the twenty-third, but we didn't get an opportunity on the twenty-third. We had an opportunity on the twenty-fourth, and the car had trouble that day.

03-00:28:48 Berglund Sokolov: So you were really waiting; the timing was opportunistic. You were waiting for an opportunity?

03-00:28:54 Mather: It was a couple of things. Walter and I were both waiting for this other trial, otherwise we would have probably been shipped out, by then, to Leavenworth. In a way, us getting involved in that other demonstration helped us stay there so we could escape, but we didn't realize that at the time. But that's the situation. The escape was really nervy. It took a while, and I look back on it—and they had just killed a guy, and they'd shot at a guy before that. And yet, we still did it, because we knew—both of us knew we had to. We're not going to let them have us. Once we got out, and we got shifted from Adrienne's house, and I think everyone being okay with this—

03-00:29:52 Berglund Sokolov: Let's back up a little tiny bit.

03-00:29:54 Mather: Yeah, sure.

03-00:29:54 Berglund Sokolov: About hailing the cab and getting a cab. Did you always have money with you, or money stashed? Was that something you were doing in preparation for this?

03-00:30:07 Mather: All about it. It was all about it. Yeah, I borrowed a twenty-dollar bill from a Catholic priest. I figured that was a good place to borrow twenty bucks. I took my boot heel off of my boot, and there was a little hollow in there. I folded it up and put it in there, and I put it back on and beat it on the ground till it was solid again and left it there. It worked, and it was fine.

03-00:30:37 Berglund Sokolov: How long was it there?

03-00:30:39 Mather: A few weeks, probably. But we were preparing. We were saying, okay, where can we go? What country? You know? Right toward the end they'd say, well, if you do escape—we understand, but we don't really want you to. But if you escape, you can go to Canada, you can go to Cuba, or you can go to the Soviet Union.

03-00:31:06 Berglund Sokolov: Who were you getting this counsel from?

03-00:31:09 Mather: The resistance.

03-00:31:11 Berglund Sokolov: They were coming to see you as visitors?

03-00:31:12 Mather: No. They were talking to us really once we were absolutely concerned we were going to escape, and soon, I put the word out that they should try to do some research for us, and they did. But I didn't really hear about a lot of this until after we were out, and they had—why give us that information until we're out? It was like once we were out, they said, "Okay, what's going to happen?" I just did the math and I said, "Canada." Because Walter was already a landed immigrant in Canada, so it was just a natural, a natural. He didn't have any papers with him, but you know, yeah.

03-00:31:55 Berglund Sokolov: Did you know, in advance, where you would go once you left, in terms of the immediate next step of I will go to this person's house?

03-00:32:05 Mather: No, we didn't know. We were taken places. We went to San Carlos.

03-00:32:09 Berglund Sokolov: But when you got in the cab.

03-00:32:11 Mather: Oh, when I got a cab I had an address. Yeah, I had an address, sure, and I just gave him the address. That's it. He gave me change when we got out of the car. I just went, "[making a knocking sound]" and Adrienne opened the door and she said, "Come in, come in." [laughing] You know, like that, because she didn't expect us, I don't think. But we were just sitting around going [whispering] "We're out. Now what?"

03-00:32:43 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know how long it took back at the stockade for them to realize you were missing?

03-00:32:47 Mather: Well, I think so. We did a little bit of work in the morning, and so it was before lunch that we—somewhere around maybe after ten, something like that—we put the tools away, because it was getting to Christmas Eve, and we were not going to do any more work. Plus, we wanted to time it ourselves, and so we took it over, because we knew everybody would be rounded up pretty soon and would be thinking about chow. Some of the guards, they eat earlier. They were real skeleton crews, and we looking uh, okay, well, how are we going to do this? We had the opportunity in which we did it. We said, "Okay, boom, boom, boom." We had already decided what, how, and when—but the when was negotiable. I do remember it, and that was a little—not harrowing, but—and we tried not to look over our shoulders. You didn't want to do that. You just don't want to do that. You don't do that normally, so you don't want to do that. And like Walter was one of the guys, we were—and I'm going to say this, into this, in this particular point. Because Walter and I, and a whole bunch of other people, had injected blood into our system from a gentleman that had hepatitis, so we could get hepatitis, so we could go to the hospital and be able to escape from an easier place.

03-00:34:20 Berglund Sokolov: You did that inside the stockade?

03-00:34:22 Mather: Inside the stockade.

03-00:34:24 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know around when you had done that?

03-00:34:25 Mather: We shared a needle. Pardon me?

03-00:34:28 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know around what point during your incarceration in the stockade you did that?

03-00:34:33 Mather: [sighing] I'm trying to think. It wasn't that far—it wasn't that—somewhere, maybe—September, October. Something like that. I don't know exactly when, I can't remember. I could ask some of the other guys. They might remember. A lot of guys did it, because it was just—like think about how insane that was to do. But we were children, and we were desperate. It could have been during the AIDS crisis just as easily. A lot of these guys came down with hepatitis, and got yellow and had to go to the hospital. Walter came down with hepatitis on the road, on the way to Canada.

03-00:35:20 Berglund Sokolov: Tell us a little bit about that, and tell us about how you get to Canada.

03-00:35:26 Mather: Sure. Well, as we're leaving the Bay Area, we were in San Carlos for a couple of nights. But I think we were in the Bay Area like three, three and a half, to four days. It was like—what is there, like about twelve days between—eight days between Christmas and New Year's, something like that, so it was like we hung here. I visited with my parents. My parents drove down to a school where I met them, and then we drove around in my dad's car with them. Drove by the house, didn't get to see my brothers and sisters or anything. It was just too much, you know? Too much. But I did get to see Mom and Dad, and they gave me a couple hundred bucks, and "Call me when you get there," kind of a thing.

03-00:36:21 Berglund Sokolov: Was it too much to see your siblings in that you were—it was too risky?

03-00:36:26 Mather: No.

03-00:36:27 Berglund Sokolov: Or it was too emotional?

03-00:36:28 Mather: Too emotional. There's no need to expose all the kids to this and make them worry. They don't need to know about it. I mean, they were young, and it was unnecessary. I would call them, and I would send cards when I got there, and gifts and things like that. But that was really difficult. That was really a hard time, not being around my brothers and sisters as they were growing up. That, I feel like that was a pretty big loss, for maybe them and me. You know, because I used to beat them up. [laughter] Yeah, you know, so there was that poignant time, and my dad turned to me and said, "Well, Keith, you're going to have to live with it." I said, "I know," and away I went. We got a ride, a car loaned to us, from a couple, a couple, both working in San Francisco. She was a schoolteacher, and he was a police officer, and they loaned us their Rambler station wagon. Father Joe Sontag, a Franciscan priest, drove us to Canada, but by the way of Priest River, Idaho, where he picked up—that's where his family is from, and he picked up his

sister. A female in the front seat with a minister. I think we're okay. We're going to get across, you know? It felt pretty good.

03-00:37:55 Berglund Sokolov: Was there a strategy around having Fr. Joe involved in this?

03-00:38:01 Mather: Well, Fr. Joe was the guy who gave me the twenty-dollar bill, so Fr. Joe was in on it. [laughing] But they wanted to help. They didn't want us in jail. But since we had chosen to do this, they were going to make sure we got away. We got a ride to Priest River, and we stayed there one night, got back in the car the next day and drove, that day, across the border into Grand Forks, British Columbia.

03-00:38:35 Berglund Sokolov: Was there any suspicion when you crossed the border?

03-00:38:38 Mather: Not much, I don't think, because we asked the father, we said, "Hey, Father, could you unzip your coat a little and reveal your collar? Would that be good? Wouldn't that be good?" [laughing] He was reluctant. He didn't want to use it for that. I said, "Father, what better use could you put it to today?" [laughing] And he did a little. Anyway, we got across, and so these little things I remember because they were a maddening and nervous time. But we got across to Grand Forks. They had to get back right away, so we just spent a few minutes talking in the car, and shared where we were headed and went over to Vancouver, and blah-blah. And then we got bus tickets, took all night, yeah, driving all night. We wanted to get stoned really bad and we couldn't, so we bought a jar of nutmeg, and ate nutmeg—I'd never do that again. [laughter] Yeah, I know. Those were the days! But we got to Vancouver and there was about six inches of snow on the ground, and whoa. We got a room downtown, just for the night, and tried to sort things out.

Slowly, we went to the Committee to Aid American War Objectors. They lined us up with some people just to help us around, and maybe a place to stay—because a lot of Americans were coming up there, and some of them had jobs already, and things like that. Sometimes there were bedrooms we could use for a period of time, and they would help you out. I even lived with another couple for about a month, a month and a half, in the springtime.

03-00:40:38 Berglund Sokolov: When you first got up there, and you were in that downtown hotel room, did you make any phone calls?

03-00:40:45 Mather: No. No phone calls from that room. When we eventually did rent a room, for a longer period of time, right near the vehicle inspection station, right near Stanley Park, there was a room and it had a phone in it, and I picked it up and it had a dial tone. And I went "Oh, this is too good to be true," because

we wanted to contact people, and we could call home. So we did, we did all that. But one of the first calls we made was just a fun—the most fun thing, in the moment, was we called the stockade. It rang and rang and rang. Finally somebody picked it up and identified themselves. In an authoritarian voice I said, "Thank you, Specialist, could you please put Guard Commander Roger Broomfield on the phone?" Of course they just [said], "Right away, Sir." They got him down there and I said, "Hey, Roger. Hey, Roger, yeah, hey. It's Keith. We're in Vancouver." He was going, "All right," because he was our friend, you know? It was just he was in a bad situation.

03-00:42:10 Berglund Sokolov: How did you know he was different than the other guards?

03-00:42:11 Mather: How did I know? Look, he was basically a Pacifica boy, right? Local. I saw his bloodshot eyes, and I saw his attitude, and I saw the way he was with others. And he and I talked; he and I talked. Plus, I was in the newspapers and on television before I came into the stockade, so they knew who I—he knew who I was. He knew what I was about, to a certain degree, so we became—it was an easy opening. I'm always friendly, anyway, and people— I can tell if they're decent or not. I don't care what uniform they have on. But he was just very cool, would give us a heads-up—"Hey man, this guy's weird," and like that. But it was really just a natural thing for him to be that way. If you know him now, he's kind of affable and not really pushing any big agenda, and that's the way he was then. He was having a hard time though, and he'd talk to me about it, "I'm just saying man, it's really hard for me to come in here." I'd say, "I really feel for ya." [laughing] We'd joke back and forth like that. At the same time, I understood that he was really going through hell because he was having to leave jail and go into the world, and then come back in the jail and work, and go back into the city—back and forth every day. That would really have been hard, especially with the way he felt. We had a kind of a compassionate relationship, with compassion for each other.

03-00:43:59 Berglund Sokolov: Did he let other people know about the phone call?

03-00:44:01 Mather: Oh yeah. Yeah. He got the phone call and [said], "Okay, bye. Thank you, Sir," and then went upstairs to tell the guys, and said, "Hey, they're in Vancouver." They had a pretty good time with that, you know? They were really happy, because—and I've spoken earlier about the—whatever guilt I carried, or anything like that, by leaving prior to them leaving. That's a normal thing. Anybody who's ever been in jail and watches somebody else get out of jail—it never feels good, even though you're happy for them— because you're not. I knew they would feel that, but I also knew, in their heart, they would be, "Fuck," really happy that we had made it and we had

succeeded. We beat them. That was the most important thing, see? And they carried that around. [laughing]

03-00:45:01 Berglund Sokolov: So let me ask you—there was an earlier escape attempt by Mike Marino?

03-00:45:06 Mather: Yeah, there were several escape attempts, and certainly Mike Marino tried twice, I think.

03-00:45:10 Berglund Sokolov: I'm kind of just curious about why Mike's attempts didn't work, and yours did. Is it just luck?

03-00:45:20 Mather: Maybe.

03-00:45:21 Berglund Sokolov: Planning?

03-00:45:22 Mather: I mean, I don't really know the scope of his escape, other than what he told me, and what I understand is the one where he dug a hole right in front of the guard. That was a good one, but that was just dramatic. He gave the guy some coffee or tea or hot chocolate with some sedatives in it—because it was really cold out, and gave him that—doped the guy up a little bit. Mike went out, out of Building 1212, because you could get out, and there was a fence around 1212, but that was it. There was just a fence, and there was the guard shack on the other side of the fence. Well, the guy was sleeping, so he went out there, no lights—[making a whirring sound]—really like that, so he just—with a stick in his hands he dug a hole underneath the fence and crawled out, and that's how he got his name "The Mole," and it stuck. He got picked up the next morning, I think, from that one—I don't know how. I don't know what got him caught. But I think he tried another time too, but it didn't get off base, you know; it didn't get off base. I don't know if there were very many other guys who tried to escape. I know there were people who talked about it, but it was an easy post to get off of. This was an easy place to get out of. The jail wasn't so easy, but once you were out it was pretty—because the public was all over this post then.

03-00:47:09 Berglund Sokolov: It was an open post.

03-00:47:11 Mather: It basically was, and there were times they did shut it down, but it was mostly—the gates were open. You could drive in and drive through. So for me it was like—getting out of here was like mixed. Certainly getting out of jail was great, but leaving home was not.

03-00:47:30 Berglund Sokolov: Let's talk a little bit about your experience in Canada. You were there from 1968 to 1980?

03-00:47:40 Mather: Yeah. Like I said, we got there on New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day we were in Vancouver. I lived in Vancouver for—I'm thinking a year. At one point in time we rented a house, Walter and I and a few other guys. When I say a few other guys, all the other guys—at one point there were five of us living in the house who had all escaped from the stockade.

03-00:48:13 Berglund Sokolov: Really?

03-00:48:14 Mather: Yeah. It was like being in jail, except we had beer. [laughing] But yeah, there was other escapees who escaped later. Lindy escaped—Ricky didn't escape. But Lindy Blake and Tom Kite and Larry Gordon, three escapees that we were all rooming with in Vancouver, in the same house. So that was an interesting deal. There were two mutineers and three others, who were going to have time to do for sure. Larry Gordon was a Gypsy Joker, motorcycle gang from Depadeau, Louisiana. [laughing] When he came in he was wearing a big chain as a belt. So Tom Kite was just a local hippie acid freak that was in the Army. But I saw them both in Montreal, and I saw Larry at the American Deserters Committee. We bumped into each other there. Walter came to visit in Montreal when I was there too, and I saw him there. I don't know what happened to those guys, though. I don't know.

03-00:49:40 Berglund Sokolov: You had a pretty short period of being connected closely with people who had also escaped from the stockade?

03-00:49:49 Mather: Yeah, when I left BC, because of a—we were on a commune. We were living on a commune, the PX Ranch, which has a great history in BC. The immigration and passport were hot after Americans, you know? They were doing the bidding of the military, or something. You know, you had to be careful. I got word that they had come up looking for me at the ranch, and somebody—they may have an address. They may know where mail had come from, or something, so I said, "Well, we've got to go. We've got to go."

03-00:50:37 Berglund Sokolov: Who was "we" at this point?

03-00:50:39 Mather: Oh, Nancy. Nancy. I had met Nancy in Vancouver, and we had traveled together to the PX Ranch. She was pregnant when I met her, and we became real close, real close quickly, and became boyfriend and girlfriend really. I felt like I needed—I wanted to take care of her. And her situation—I just felt like that it was a tough, tough time. She had left home and all this sort of

thing, so anyway, a difficult period of time. We went to Montreal, after we went to Nakusp, a little town in BC. We stayed there while we were working, and so forth. At one point in time we all lived in a treehouse overlooking a creek that salmon spawn in, and I'd just go out in the morning and flick my line out in the water and whack—I'd pull up a kokanee salmon, and there was breakfast and something. The only problem was we didn't have a door to the treehouse, and we had to pull the ladder up though, so nothing else would come up. [laughter] Yeah, all those things went on, but we got that scare, and then we got on a bus and went to Montreal. I took my rifle with me, and my backpack and my hiking boots—that's all I had.

We got to Montreal and we were put up with Nancy's parents. Her name is Nancy LaPlante, and so we lived in Ville d'Anjou. We stayed there a year. We were married in March of '71, and proceeded to move on. Now, I've omitted a child that was the result of that pregnancy. Nancy gave that child up for adoption, and even though I was with her—but I wasn't with her at the time—there was a gap where I had peeled off. And then she came back to me, and it was really a difficult period, her going back and forth, back and forth, and she went back and forth before too.

03-00:53:17 Berglund Sokolov: And back and forth you mean—?

03-00:53:18 Mather: Back and forth about whether she was going to keep the child, do all that. I was not in any position to tell her that I could help too much. I had nothing. I was unlanded. I didn't know anything, and it was hard. But ultimately it was, I think, the right thing for her to do, based on the fact that I ended up raising the two children that her and I had together. So with no aspersions on her, really. People do what they're capable of, I guess.

03-00:53:55 Berglund Sokolov: Did you eventually find a relatively stable situation in Canada?

03-00:54:01 Mather: Yeah, oh I think so. Nancy and I lived together for seven or eight years. We didn't divorce until I had come back to the United States. We were a couple. Our son was born in Winnipeg in '72, and then we had spent three years in Winnipeg—and I had to get out. It was too cold. We moved to British Columbia in, again, in the spring. It must have been '73, and then in '74 we had a daughter, Megan. We were living in Vernon at that time, and I was working at the Mica Dam, the largest earth-filled dam in the free world at the time. And subsequently I worked at another dam, the Revelstoke Dam later. But we didn't really want to be in town in an apartment. We wanted to be in the country, you know? We looked for a rental in the country, because I had to commute to work no matter where I was. I was going 140 miles to work and would stay there a week or ten days, and then come home for three days and do it again.

We found a little rental out in a place called Edgewood, British Columbia. It's a little valley, maybe eight miles long, three miles wide. We got a rental for $150 a month or something and moved out there. It took us a while to meet locals and get going and that stuff, but afterwards, there was about thirty families, all our own age, all with kids. It was great. It was just like we're all doing the same thing. We all have our gardens, we're all building houses, we're helping each other. A great community that I fell into, really, and lived there—built a house, and so forth, and lived there. I lived there for three and a half years, but then Nancy and I split up, and I moved up to Nakusp so I could work easily, and get away from her—I guess that's fair to say—and give her some independence too. That was another little, great little town. Nakusp was wonderful. I joined a band up there, the best band in town, because I left the band in Edgewood because it was just a little too far, and ended up playing with both of them a lot of the time—but had a ball, had a really good time. You know, the only bar in town was the social club, and it was very—a lot of young people, a lot of young men and women, working, living in the country, coming in and out of town, with a lot of stuff going on. It was really good.

03-00:56:56 Berglund Sokolov: Were there both Canadians and Americans in that area?

03-00:56:58 Mather: Oh yeah, a big mix, a big mix. In the valley I lived in, I'm counting the Americans right now, I'd say there was, aside from Brits and others, I'd say there was at least a dozen Canadian men and possibly their Canadian wife or American wife there. It was kind of clear why everybody was there. It was either political—they just didn't want to be in this country anymore. They had made a decision to leave. Or they needed to, and a lot—it was pretty clear. A lot of—the Doukhobors up there were really, really supportive of all the young Americans who were refusing to fight, because that's what they did in Tsarist Russia. There was a real built-in support for that kind of behavior among these groups of people, and they would help you and let you live on their land—be your friend and treat you right.

03-00:58:03 Berglund Sokolov: Let's talk a little bit about what prompts you to come back to the United States in 1980.

03-00:58:11 Mather: Oh sure. Like I said, working pretty far away. I was only seeing my kids every few weeks, and I wasn't really happy with that, and I wasn't happy with the way I would find them, the conditions they would be in, where there would be cleanliness, their clothes, scatterbrained—whatever it would be, and I knew that they weren't getting what they needed. It was pretty clear. When we were getting laid off around the Christmas holidays, because they just let you go for a couple weeks, I asked Nancy, I said, "Hey, I'm getting laid off. I have a little bit of money. How about me taking the kids to

California for Christmas?" Well, she didn't argue with me. It was an opportunity for her to do something herself. After all she had two kids, [she's] a mom, and so it was fine. I didn't know I wasn't going to come back—I was just going.

03-00:59:20 Berglund Sokolov: Had you returned to the United States previously?

03-00:59:22 Mather: I had, I had. I went back in '76. I drove the whole family down here and stayed for six months almost, worked in the union, got a California driver's license, got pulled over by police twice, you know?

03-00:59:53 Berglund Sokolov: And just flew under the radar screen.

03-00:59:54 Mather: Ffffff—evidently, which is kind of interesting. Did they really have records on me? I didn't even know. So yeah, it was just fun. But I bought this little station wagon, and came down here and did a little body work on it and had it painted, drove it back, nice little shiny car. We got back and this was kind of fun. I was collecting unemployment while I was down here, in Canada. A friend of mine would just sign the papers every week, and nobody does that, right? I came home to a couple of thousand dollars so I could fix up the house a little more. So things were working, things were working. But when I had to go back up to the dams to start working again, and I wasn't seeing the kids, and then it started to manifest, really started—and I couldn't do it anymore. When I did decide to come at Christmas, it was like three days of driving, a little nervous with the kids. But I remember I bought my daughter a doll that had a—it was like a Raggedy Ann doll. It had a smile on one side, and a little bit of a frown on the other, so she could let me know how she was doing, and she liked that. And I bought them both coats because they needed them, and just got down here.

03-01:01:31 Berglund Sokolov: Did you know that you weren't going to go back?

03-01:01:32 Mather: It was hard. It was hard to know that. I think I didn't know. I think I was coming down right now to deal with this now. What am I going to do? I'm not sure. I think I probably kind of figured I might stay, but it was always like this until I started working a lot and making better money and having— being able to see my kids every day. This is what I was after. So yeah, it was a good time. It was a good time to be home. I get to see all my friends. I was still illegal, but I wasn't behaving in that fashion. I wasn't letting it in, you know?

03-01:02:18 Berglund Sokolov: Where did you live?

03-01:02:20 Mather: I lived in San Bruno with my mother and father.

03-01:02:24 Berglund Sokolov: So you went home.

03-01:02:24 Mather: I went home, yeah. I had no choice. I needed the help. I needed the help. I could have done it up there. I could have done it, but I wouldn't have seen my children, so I couldn't have done it there. This was what people do. They have children, they become a burden in some degree, and then they try to rely on their family.

03-01:02:50 Berglund Sokolov: How did your family react and respond to your return?

03-01:02:54 Mather: Oh, awesome. They were really thrilled. Worried about me a little, but happy anyway.

03-01:03:02 Berglund Sokolov: Did they feel like they were at risk by having you and your kids—?

03-01:03:04 Mather: No, they weren't worried about that at all, not even a little. Not even a little, no. I mean there were people down here that—where Randy stayed with them before he was arrested, right? Randy Rowland. Somebody let the cat out of the bag about who they were and where he stayed, and those people were haunted by the FBI and local police. In other ways, I think. They ultimately left the country. They went back to Canada. They were harassed, and so that was going on too, but that was just a side thing.

03-01:03:49 Berglund Sokolov: What kind of work did you find down here when you came back?

03-01:03:54 Mather: I just went right in the Carpenters Union. I was a card-carrying union member. I want to log into your local. Put me on the list, please. And then I went out and found my own work and told them I got a job. This is the company, paid my dues. That was simple, you know?

03-01:04:13 Berglund Sokolov: It sounds like you were living a pretty ordinary life, taking care of your kids, going to work.

03-01:04:19 Mather: Yeah. Dating. And just trying to have a life back in California. I started wanting to be interested in things. I wanted to do more stuff, go more places, but I was kind of hogtied with this whole legal situation. Time goes on, time moves on, and the kids and I moved. I got a girlfriend, Virginia Carroll, and we decided we were going to move to Half Moon Bay. We found a nice little

three-bedroom house with a garage in the back. It had a studio apartment above it for somebody else, but had that. It was great. The kids went to elementary school at Cunha in Half Moon Bay, went to Half Moon Bay High eventually. We stayed on the coast, and we rented there for a few years. I was still illegal, you know, at that time.

In 1984 I stopped at this gas station on the way up 92 to go over the hill, into the peninsula from the coast, and I dropped my driver's license in a gas station as I was pulling out my money or whatever. It got picked up and handed off to a sheriff. The sheriff shipped it over to San Bruno Police Station because there was an address in San Bruno on it. I got a call from the San Bruno Police Station after they ran it, found the federal warrant, and said, "Hey, Mr. Mather. We have your driver's license here. Maybe you'd like to come pick it up?" [in a whisper] Not really, but I'm going to do it.

03-01:06:14 Berglund Sokolov: Did they tell you at that point that they knew?

03-01:06:17 Mather: [laughing] No, no, no. A little more sophisticated than that, yeah. No. They didn't say a word. I kind of knew. I kind of knew. So, I told my mom. I said, "Mom, I think I'm going to jail, because they just called, and I ain't running no more, from anything." I got too many responsibilities. I can't do that no more. I made sure my—I took money out of the bank and positioned—got things set for the kids. Hugged them, kissed them, "I may be gone for a few days," you know, and whatever, like that. And then went over there. They arrested me. I called a friend, "Can you bring me some cigarettes, man?" I was still smoking then. Fred, my buddy, he brought it over, some cigarettes and sympathy. He's a Vietnam vet, and we were on the gymnastics team together at school. So anyway, I get arrested, I spend a night there. The MPs come down and get me and take me back up to the Presidio here, one of these buildings here I slept overnight in.

03-01:07:37 Berglund Sokolov: They didn't put you—

03-01:07:38 Mather: The stockade was closed.

03-01:07:40 Berglund Sokolov: By then.

03-01:07:41 Mather: Yeah, I think so, right. In the '80s. I don't know. Yeah, they just kept me in the MP station. It's a lot easier to do that than to process me into the stockade. The next—because I was due to go to Fort Ord, so they drove me to Fort Ord the next day. It was hilarious. They drove me down the road in handcuffs, which I didn't like at all.

03-01:08:10 Berglund Sokolov: How long was that drive?

03-01:08:12 Mather: Oh, just to Monterey, you know? You know, two, three hours. But when I got there, they let me out, took the handcuffs off, and that was it. That was it. There's your barracks, go in there and report. The chow hall's over there. Strange. I'm like a soldier in a barracks now, after being handcuffed all the way down here. There's all this stuff.

03-01:08:41 Berglund Sokolov: Was it that they didn't really know what to do with you at that point?

03-01:08:44 Mather: They didn't understand. They just knew that I had been arrested and there was a warrant there, but they didn't know anything else. They didn't have my files, my 201 file, my military records. They didn't have anything. I was in the Special Processing Detachment, was given weekend passes so I could drive home to Half Moon Bay and visit with my children, hang out, see my friends, do whatever—mostly just taking care of the kids and the house and setting things up. So now I go back and forth, and then they got the 201 file, and that was that. I was basically—that day—taken out of the stockade, driven right up—excuse me, taken out of the Special Processing Detachment, driven up to the stockade and marched right into a solitary confinement cell.

03-01:09:40 Berglund Sokolov: And that was where?

03-01:09:42 Mather: That was Fort Ord Stockade.

03-01:09:46 Berglund Sokolov: How long did it take for them to get your 201 file?

03-01:09:49 Mather: Well, let's see. I would say the better part of a month, I think—maybe two or three weeks at least, yeah. And yeah, then another situation right away. I contacted my attorney, let him know where I was.

03-01:10:08 Berglund Sokolov: Who was your attorney?

03-01:10:11 Mather: Howard De Nike.

03-01:10:12 Berglund Sokolov: How did you choose him as your attorney?

03-01:10:17 Mather: Well, he was available; he was recommended. I'm not sure exactly how that all happened, but as soon as I was arrested my wife got on the horn and quickly—I think we had maybe used Howard already for something, for her.

03-01:10:34 Berglund Sokolov: And you had remarried at this time?

03-01:10:36 Mather: Mmmm—let me think here for a minute. No.

03-01:10:40 Berglund Sokolov: I mean is wife—

03-01:10:41 Mather: We weren't married yet, no.

03-01:10:42 Berglund Sokolov: Okay.

03-01:10:46 Mather: Where the hell was I? I'm sorry.

03-01:10:55 Berglund Sokolov: Your attorney, how you found your attorney. How things heat up very quickly after they get your file.

03-01:11:02 Mather: Yeah, sure. They didn't know what to do with me after they got the file either. I was a dinosaur.

03-01:11:12 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

03-01:11:13 Mather: They were saying to me, "Man, if you'd have just stayed in a little bit longer, you've got a pension. You've been gone over seventeen years, man, and you went AWOL." I said, "I've been AWOL longer than most people have been in the Army," I told them. That's my claim to fame, okay? [laughter] One of them, anyway. The lowest rank over the longest period. [hearty laughter] Yeah. Prove [to] me I'm wrong. Oh yeah, jeez. So Howard helped us out. He was really working really hard, lobbying—not so much the legal stuff. He was doing all that. But lobbying—he lobbied with Dean Filippo, who was my prosecutor. He was ill, dying basically, down in the Monterey area. He reached out to him saying, "Hey, could you put in a word for Keith? It has been all this time," and blah, blah, blah. He said no. I said, "Well, too bad he died." But what a worthless moment. Howard was wonderful, and he still is. He coined kind of a term in the description of me, in the way I was portrayed. He called me, "the last prisoner of conscience of the Vietnam War." I don't know if that's 100 percent accurate, but it's close. That got some press.

03-01:13:05 Berglund Sokolov: What kind of press?

03-01:13:05 Mather: Yeah, like I'm some Japanese soldier on an abandoned island for thirty years or something. That's the kind of framework. All in all, Howard did a lot of work. He ended up communicating directly with the secretary of the Army, and putting pressure on him through Washington, and got me out. The secretary of the Army remitted the remainder of my sentence. This is not clemency. He remitted the remainder of my sentence. It's all he did. [laughing] Just reduced it. The charges were still there. There was no clemency. I still got a dishonorable discharge. I mean, there's no clemency.

03-01:13:56 Berglund Sokolov: Did the dishonorable discharge have any kind of effect on you?

03-01:14:02 Mather: Well, you know, when I first got it I was kind of like—I thought about it. But most of the jobs I do, they don't really give a damn. I wasn't too worried about it. And I was proud of it.

03-01:14:22 Berglund Sokolov: How come?

03-01:14:23 Mather: Well, how could I accept an honorable discharge for this war, for being in service in this war? How could I feel good about that? And so I said no, this is the one I wanted, about this war.

03-01:14:41 Berglund Sokolov: So the dishonorable discharge didn't feel dishonorable to you.

03-01:14:44 Mather: It's like my resistance degree, put it that way, you know? I put it in a gold frame, and I hung it on my wall.

03-01:14:52 Berglund Sokolov: Is it still on your wall?

03-01:14:55 Mather: No, it isn't. Actually, I don't have enough wall space, and I got tired of looking at it a little bit. I even took down my certifications for building inspection. As soon as I don't need them anymore, I took them down. I don't need to look at my degree. I don't need to look at my—I like looking at my dive certification. That's the most fun one. But yeah, and that's the one thing, when I got back here, when I came home—not so much in the beginning you know, just trying to survive. But once I got out, once I got that dishonorable discharge, after Ford Ord, after in and out of solitary for several different reasons. First it was you're in isolation. Why are you in isolation? Okay,

well—you're an escape risk. Okay? Obviously, I'd escaped. I just escaped and got picked up, so yeah, I'm an escape risk.

03-01:15:54 Berglund Sokolov: After they'd given you kind of free rein of the place at the beginning.

03-01:15:57 Mather: A little bit, a little bit. But once they realized the deal, they put me right in the box. I stayed there like twenty-eight days, and they let me out a day, and I went oh, cool. They put me right back in, and I said, "Wow, how come you're doing this?" He goes, "Oh, suicide risk." Another reason is to keep me in solitary.

03-01:16:23 Berglund Sokolov: How long did you, were you imprisoned before your release?

03-01:16:27 Mather: In Fort Ord? I'm trying to be accurate. I got out May 10, 1985. I went in the ninth of December. This is my total time from the arrest to getting out. It was my sister's birthday too. When I got home, they gave me a really cheap suit of clothes, with kind of a plastic windbreaker and a blue shirt and jeans, and socks and something to wear on my feet—I don't know what that was— a $20 bill and a plane ticket home.

03-01:17:13 Berglund Sokolov: Did you have visitors while you were in jail there?

03-01:17:17 Mather: In Fort Ord?

03-01:17:18 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

03-01:17:18 Mather: Yeah, I had one, and that was Hal Muskat. Hal Muskat was a friend—a friend of mine and a friend of the movement and was also a vet, and he knew Howard real well. They were active in my wanting my release, and he was involved in that. He acted as Howard's paralegal, with a letter from Howard, and went to see me. In so doing so, he brought about two pounds of my mother's fudge and some Kools—he didn't know what I smoked—some Kools and some other cigarettes.

03-01:18:02 Berglund Sokolov: What did you smoke?

03-01:18:04 Mather: I smoked Marlboros, or whatever I could get—icky time.

03-01:18:14 Berglund Sokolov: Was that stay in Fort Ord the end of your imprisonment?

03-01:18:17 Mather: Yeah. Well, no—I went to Fort Riley, Kansas, but I'm trying to get to that. [laughing] I kind of misspoke actually. I got shipped off again, from Fort Ord, because I fell [or] was pushed down the stairs at Fort Ord. I was in the hospital, unconscious, for almost fifty hours. They had surgeons scrubbed and stuff. They were giving me scans, and I was not awake. My wife was with me, and we were married then—no, we weren't either—and I woke up. I looked over, and there was my wife, soon-to-be, and held her hand and looked out the window, and there were two armed MPs sitting right there.

03-01:19:36 Berglund Sokolov: How did you fall down the stairs?

03-01:19:36 Mather: Yeah, that's a good question, and nobody has ever resolved that for me. I think I was pushed from behind. I was carrying a mattress on my back and was pushed from behind. I don't know, I wasn't awake—I don't know, but I know the results and the aftereffects of what happened. So you know, that was hard in Fort Ord. Yeah, it was hard. But because of the press around that happening, Pvt. Mather, long-term AWOL, peace activist—fell down the stairs? No, probably not, right? Bad press for them. The commanding general said, "I want him out of here now, right now." The next morning, two MPs came, put me in a car, one on either side of me, another one driving, drove me to the airport, put me in an aircraft—MPs on either side of me.

03-01:20:32 Berglund Sokolov: On a private plane?

03-01:20:32 Mather: No.

03-01:20:33 Berglund Sokolov: Army plane?

03-01:20:35 Mather: Yeah—no, it was a private—commercial aircraft. They had to force them to take off those handcuffs. "You can't have him in here with handcuffs." They had their guns on too. That was way back. So anyway, they got me to Fort Riley, and immediately, once again, put me in solitary confinement, you know. They keep you there for a little while, and then they did—once they got the copy of my 201 file—I think they shipped it with me—then they decided what to do with me, and they put me into the general population. Put me to work, you know?

03-01:21:16 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know why they made the decision to move you to Fort Riley? Why that choice?

03-01:21:22 Mather: Yeah, the commanding general of the post did not want the press, and he had the press knocking on the gates every day I was there. He didn't want to deal with it. It wasn't his issue, so he shipped me out.

03-01:21:38 Berglund Sokolov: Was Fort Riley a different kind of post? Or was it just getting you out of California?

03-01:21:42 Mather: I don't know whether I was supposed to do my time there or whether I was supposed to go to Leavenworth, because they had reduced my time on appeal from four years to eighteen months, okay? Plus the time I had already done was given—you know, credit and the pretrial, a little bit of time. Or the time that I had served after my court-martial, you know, like that month, and then the other time in captivity after that would be considered part of that sentence. So anyway, that's the way that went. They just kicked the can down the road. That's all they were doing. And so here I'm taken away from my family, taken away from my attorney—that's what they wanted to do. Take me—that's what they do. And my own military attorney came to the stockade, not to see me, but she was—the stockade in Fort Ord, so this is just before I was shipped out. They did not even tell her I was being shipped out, my own military attorney. That's the level of hostility that was being put out. Anyway, when I got to Fort Riley, it was a mellower scene, because it just was. There were fewer prisoners. I spent a lot of time in solitary, but not for anything I did.

03-01:23:11 Berglund Sokolov: How long were you in Fort Riley?

03-01:23:14 Mather: Again, I was there from probably the twelfth I'd say—let me think for a second. I got out May 10—about three and a half months, four months.

03-01:23:28 Berglund Sokolov: Did you have visitors while you were there?

03-01:23:30 Mather: Hal Muskat. That's the guy I was telling you about. [laughing]

03-01:23:33 Berglund Sokolov: So he visited you in Fort Riley.

03-01:23:35 Mather: He visited me in Fort Riley, yeah. Not Fort Ord, Fort Riley—sorry.

03-01:23:38 Berglund Sokolov: Did your family visit you at either of these places?

03-01:23:41 Mather: No. My family visited me at Fort Ord, my wife and kids and brothers came.

03-01:23:50 Berglund Sokolov: What was that like?

03-01:23:51 Mather: It was difficult having your children visit you in prison. That's a new one for me. And they were young, you know?

03-01:23:57 Berglund Sokolov: How old were they about? Ten, eleven, something like that?

03-01:24:00 Mather: [sigh] Yeah, my daughter was a little bit younger than that, but my son was probably twelve, yeah. But they knew why I was there. They knew the whole deal, and plus, they're Canadian citizens. They're part of this. When I mentioned to them one time, I said, "What do you guys remember of the war?" He goes, "Oh Dad, we remember the war, okay?" They've lived a lot through it, but the upshot of being out in Fort Riley was it was just distant, so my communication was much less, and so it was a little harder. But I was given KP to do almost all the time. It kept me busy. They made me a carpenter again, because I was one. [laughing] I started fixing little crap and getting outside a little. It was just doing my time, and I knew it. I just had to shut up and not get any more charges. Guys were calling me Pop, you know, because I was thirty-eight. For the Army, that's old. All the guys that were in the stockade were all younger. I've admired them a lot. I preached to them about resistance in the wars and things that are coming in Central America.

03-01:25:29 Berglund Sokolov: How did they respond to that?

03-01:25:30 Mather: Some of them pretty well. Some of them came and met me afterwards when they got out, and we were both out here. Their parents and everything, came up to my home, and we talked, and stuff like that. But the impetus isn't there unless you're being pressured. People have to be, I think, really put in a bind before they act, unless they're more proactive, I think, than most. [coughing] Excuse me.

03-01:25:58 Berglund Sokolov: So you're released from prison in 1985?

03-01:26:04 Mather: Right.

03-01:26:04 Berglund Sokolov: From Fort Riley?

03-01:26:04 Mather: Right.

03-01:26:07 Berglund Sokolov: And then you go back to California?

03-01:26:09 Mather: I flew back to SFO.

03-01:26:12 Berglund Sokolov: There's press interest in you after that, the piece in the Washington [Post]—

03-01:26:21 Mather: I was met in Kansas City by AP, another reporter, and I have an article that they wrote, with a photo of me waiting in Kansas City for my connecting flight.

03-01:26:34 Berglund Sokolov: How about the Washington Post article?

03-01:26:36 Mather: Well, the Washington Post article happened much later. I had been married, and it was a few years later, actually, the Washington Post—and bought a house, and so forth. In the days back when I was resisting, in the '60s, and I went into the Army and my bunkmate was Jay Mathews. Jay Mathews was an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and he had volunteered for the draft as a journalist. He didn't think he could not witness this and be part of his—in tune—and so he knew he was probably going to go. But he also knew the thing about it is I was infantry. I knew that. Then they told him he was infantry. And I said, "Oh, okay. That's going to be interesting." But he never went as an infantryman because there was a little altercation, a drill sergeant ordered all of his, the whole company, to throw rocks at a trainee, which very few of us did, and—missed intentionally—and things like that. But he, when that kid got pissed off and called his parents, they got a lawyer, they went up, and they charged the sergeant. They charged him. They named Jay as a witness, so he got to stick back, and so he got a cake job working for the Stars and Stripes. But Jay was my bunkmate, and once I was out and he knew I was out, he had witnessed my resistance through the press while he was in Vietnam. You know, we knew each other in basic. There was this connection.

Later, he got ahold of me and said he had asked, for a few years, to do a story on me, do this story, so finally he got the go-ahead. His parents lived in San Carlos, so it was another way for him to get out here too, from out east. And he came out, sent a photographer out too, took a bunch of shots, and then he came out and spent a day, most of a day, sitting in my front room looking out on the ocean and just reminiscing a little bit and then writing his story. He wrote a two-page story in the Washington Post with photographs, talking about our relationship, my experience, our relationship, and it was really a good article. He was very kind to me. That was like great because out of that article I got a call from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and they asked me to fly to Canada, and they wanted to do a segment. It was like their 60 Minutes, okay? And so I did that, and I went to Edgewood again and visited my friends, got all my friends on camera talking, and the

house I built, and walking the beach and all these things. They flew back with me here and went to my home in Montara, photographed us standing on the deck—really nice, really nice. Those outcomes kept following each other, that kind of a little bit of press, a little bubble, and then I would get a call. And this is still going on—you haven't noticed, okay? [laughter]

03-01:30:28 Berglund Sokolov: Right. So how did it affect you? [In] 1998 you'd been out of prison. The charges, at this point, are behind you, right? That's over finally.

03-01:30:37 Mather: Yeah.

03-01:30:39 Berglund Sokolov: How does it affect you to have this resurgence of press at that point in your life?

03-01:30:44 Mather: Well, it was fine. I mean, I welcomed it because the press always was, on some level, kind to me. They weren't condemning of me. They were reporting.

03-01:30:56 Berglund Sokolov: Did it worry you at all in terms of your employment or the kind of work you were doing, to be outed or exposed?

03-01:31:03 Mather: Well, later on there were situations where other writers wrote about me and described me in the ways you're describing, but that didn't happen until, I think, after 2006 or '07.

03-01:31:29 Berglund Sokolov: Okay, so much later.

03-01:31:31 Mather: Yeah, and that was Joel Seller, okay?

03-01:31:34 Berglund Sokolov: Okay, when did you start working for the city?

03-01:31:42 Mather: 2002.

03-01:31:44 Berglund Sokolov: Okay.

03-01:31:45 Mather: Yeah, and stuff did happen, but prior to that I would just say that there were several different instances. Gerry Nicosia did a piece on me. I don't know if you read that or not.

03-01:32:00 Berglund Sokolov: I've seen that piece.

03-01:32:01 Mather: Okay. There are several pieces in the [San Francisco] Chronicle. I don't remember the chronology of it. At the same time, there was writing going on about me and others, within our writing workshop, by Maxine Hong Kingston.

03-01:32:23 Berglund Sokolov: What writing workshop is that?

03-01:32:24 Mather: The veterans writers workshop [The Veteran Writers Group]. It has been going for over twenty-five years, and I've been going for over twenty years, so it's a way to have—we published a book, and it's an anthology of all the writers who contributed. It's Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by Maxine and published by Koa Books on Maui.

03-01:32:57 Berglund Sokolov: Can you talk a little bit about how it felt for you to have your story told in these various outlets? There's the local press, there's Fred Gardner's book, there's the Washington Post piece, there's this current kind of burbling up of your story.

03-01:33:12 Mather: The hometown paper in Half Moon Bay too, you know, things like that. I always rejoiced in the fact that I got press. [laughing] I'm sorry. It's just hard to say, "Oh well, it's really a drag. They keep writing about me." No, I mean, and the subject matter is something that I'm proud of, and so no matter what they say or how bad they screw it up, it's still good. They've always spelled my name right, and things like that. I always felt like they were a help, as opposed to anything else. After my life was back to somewhat normal, and unlike that, kind of, I would—periodically there would be people wanting to do something. One guy wrote me from LA saying, "I really would like to write a screen adaptation for your life story. Are you willing to do this? I said, "Well, okay, what do you do?" He came up with a title, he came up with all this stuff, and I said, "Well, submit it and see what happens, and we'll talk." He got my okay, but it never went anywhere, and that was a drag. Shit. [laughter] But again, the political climate is not lending itself to any of that stuff. And then Sir! No Sir! I mean come on—I'm jumping ahead a little, but there were a lot of the years I was just pounding nails you know? Just spending time with my family, raising my kids, driving my son to bicycle races every single weekend, for many years—and loving it—and taking my daughter to baseball practice, and gymnastics, and going to the beach, watching my son surf. It was just pretty cool.

03-01:35:08 Berglund Sokolov: What did it feel like to finally have the legal issues behind you and settled?

03-01:35:16 Mather: It was a big relief. Yeah, it was just like really? It's really over? That's why I put that discharge on the wall so I could look at it, reinforce that. I don't know how other people's lives are. I only know how mine is, and what has happened and the way it has happened has enriched my life, if anything.

03-01:35:47 Berglund Sokolov: What has it been like when you meet new people? Start new relationships, and need to tell your story?

03-01:36:03 Mather: Well, that's why I want to write a book. I'm just going to push it across the table at you a little bit. [Sokolov laughs] Because it's a long story, and it's very complicated. And a lot of ins and outs—and a lot of emotion. I'm used to telling the story, as you can probably tell. But I don't feel like I'm as deeply affected as if I was telling it for the first time, certainly. The writing helped me, going through this. When I wrote a story, the first time I read a story I wrote in this workshop, I wrote about my court-martial and the fact that I saluted, and it was done in such a way that it was an unexpected outcome. I mean it really was. I was in a room of forty, fifty people, and I got applause. So I stayed. Sitting next to women who lost their husband in Vietnam, hearing her write about grief denied. Another widow wrote a book, Regret to Inform. It's a film. She went back to Vietnam with her second husband, wearing her first husband's ring—to where he was killed. This stuff is thick, and so in that room where we're writing and then reading it cold, after we wrote it often, we developed—we saw members die, we saw new members come in. People travel and then bring back their experiences there. It's still a wonderful process, and I'm intending on going back, but I've been not writing.

03-01:38:02 Berglund Sokolov: What was it like to work with Maxine?

03-01:38:04 Mather: She's a jewel. She's a living treasure of Hawaii. That's what they call her. I visited her and Earl several times.

03-01:38:19 Berglund Sokolov: Do you know what made her put her energy into the group?

03-01:38:23 Mather: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. The Oakland Hills fire. She lost her home and her manuscript—everything. The whole area looked like a war zone, and she was working with Thich Nhat Hanh, with veterans, and she just went pfffffff—you know, embraced it and started doing it. We were at Berkeley for years, and then we went to Sebastopol. We'd hop around different locations, but went to Sebastopol where we had about ten years, and these people opened their home to us.

03-01:39:05 Berglund Sokolov: How often would you meet?

03-01:39:06 Mather: Once a month, for a long time—for years. But then it went to maybe four times a year, the seasons, and we'd sit in a beautiful redwood room with a view of the turkey vultures out over the valley, just lovely, with a big grove of eucalyptus trees to walk in, that we did silent walking meditation there. Interesting watching—the Vietnam vets did not want to do it, because you're walking in a line down a trail, and they said, "No, no, no—that's not something I do ever." You know, they had rope swings and we'd go out—it was just kind of like this mystical way of doing things. We'd have a big vegetarian lunch in silence, and then get about fifteen minutes to talk, and back to the reading. We'd do the writing in the morning, and the reading in the afternoon, and then we'd do probably about an hour of meditation total, just brief meditations. And the reading takes a lot of time, because you've got to get feedback. You know, you don't have to, but if you wish to. A lot of people pick up things from other people's writing that is a part of them, and it assists them in their own work, so it's just really a good thing.

But I visited Earl—that's Maxine's husband, Earl Kingston, at Death Valley, where he was doing a one-man show, Down the Great Unknown, about Mead, the Civil War officer who lost an arm in the war, and he was the guy who went down the Colorado first. A really interesting one-man show. But I'm friends with these people, so it's like—Maxine's just one of the greatest living authors right now, and her book The Woman Warrior: [Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts] is the most taught piece of literature in colleges today, still, after thirty-some years. Anyway, that's about Maxine and Earl.

03-01:41:18 Berglund Sokolov: Did the writing, and does the writing process, help you to process these experiences? How does it impact you, or has it impacted you over the time you've been involved in it?

03-01:41:31 Mather: Well, writing about it has always been a tool—not necessarily for me, but a tool in many different areas. Like twelve-step work is basically a lot of writing, and—write about it. So that along with just my own efforts, my own little efforts at writing things down, like I don't want to forget stuff, so I'll be going through a storyline and I'll just write down little things that happened, so it will conjure—I'll know where to go in the next thing. That's as important to me as the writing part, because at first I thought you just write and that's it—no, no. [laughing] There's also good editing, you know? So I'm real cautious about that. But a lot of the poems and a lot of the things that were in this book were not—nothing was edited out, and maybe the punctuation problems, but—[coughing]. Excuse me.

03-01:42:32 Berglund Sokolov: So the writing has been one kind of tool for you to process all of this. You also recently went to Vietnam. Can you talk—

03-01:42:42 Mather: I wanted to mention, just before that, if I could?

03-01:42:43 Berglund Sokolov: Sure.

03-01:42:44 Mather: I spent about ten years speaking in schools, also in the park at the Officer's Club. Before, I've spoken to large educational groups of teachers, and taught what I teach in classes through the Veterans Speakers Alliance, for a decade.

03-01:43:08 Berglund Sokolov: And would you, in those talks, would you basically tell your story?

03-01:43:11 Mather: Yeah, I'd tell my story and answer questions. Give them my best. A lot of the guys that I would go with were Vietnam veterans. Guys that were in the real shit. They weren't as anxious—they'd go and do it, but they had trouble after—normally. They had trouble after. There was some fallout from it. I have one friend, Jimmy Janko, who stopped doing it, because he lost his best friend, or one of his best friends, right in front of him, you know? Not even having any guns, just going down to get water. They didn't even take the rifles, and stepped on a booby trap—and that was that. He was shaking when he was done. I said, "Yeah, I wouldn't do it either. I wouldn't do it either."

There's been times, in all of this, as you can imagine, where I just said, "Enough. I want my life back." But I've come to the realization: this is it. [laughing] You know? But yeah, but I mean like doing this fiftieth, doing all the preparation for it, the thinking about it, and then hearing the results back from some of the guys, and the interactions we're having, a few, and others around this and what's going on, what's going on with me—it's kind of bringing me to a place of understanding. We're not magnifying it any more than it already is. This is a significant, regardless of how it affected my life, I think this is significant. I'm watching the cop on the horse—sorry. [looking out the window] It means a lot to me, I think it's significant in the peace movement back in the day, and it has some history that is good.

I think about the damage it did to all of us. The things it took away. The stunting of other people's lives it may have done. I got a report on one of the guys that I'll share now, who was reluctant to want to come. He didn't know. Larry Sales, I believe it was. And he is a Trump supporter, which I don't get, and he was using the N word in some of the conversations he had with Randy. He may not be coming, [laughing] and that would be fine with me. Even though here we are in this mutiny thing, you've got to understand—all these guys weren't doing it for political reasons. They were pissed off, but

where they've gone in their lives after that, God only knows. I figure he's in the south, and I'm just figuring he's got the pressures to bear down there. If he's already a Trump supporter talking all that shit, then his neighbors and friends would go nuts if they knew he was involved in something like this. So maybe that should be left in the past. That's fine with me, you know, really.

03-01:46:57 Berglund Sokolov: When you were involved in the Nine for Peace and then the [Presidio] 27, did you have any inkling as that early-twenty-something-year old guy, that this would still be with you fifty years later?

03-01:47:14 Mather: I didn't think about it like that. You know, it was like what I said when I was in Canada—and I like this—you can't constantly focus on what brought you here and what problems arise to make your life situationally this way. You need to survive. You can't always be looking at it; you can't always be thinking about it. You know, that's why it would be the last thing I'd want to do is talk about it, on some level, but always to my friends and family, I was always open, you know, like this. You know how I am, and I'm proud of the story, so it's not hard to tell. But it used to be harder to tell, because then I'd be—you know, in the framework I'd be in Canada talking about here, and it doesn't really work well. That's just bringing it with you, and I was trying to put it away. I was trying to—I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine—and I think I am to a large degree.

It's hard. It's hard to have this in your life, you know? I think about what might have been occasionally, what would I have become? Sometimes I think well, maybe I just would have been a junkie. I don't know. [laughing] And other times I said to myself, "Well, I really would, I think I would be a really good judge." You know? Maybe I should go to law school. So my mind goes left and right. But being somebody who worked with their hands their whole life—and now I'm not so much, it gives me an insight into so many things. Like now I'm dealing with more people, people that have professions, with PhDs. You know, the real deal—the other end of the real deal, put it that way. We all work, we all have skills, we all have things to offer. But for me it's been like, you know, I never wanted to be a suit, okay? You know what I'm saying. I never wanted to really go down that line. I couldn't become a fireman because of my record, and I couldn't be a cop because of my record. So literally willow-whacking to get a city job, a good job, is to do what I know, and I'm a good carpenter and I'm a good builder, and so I figured I'd be an even better inspector. I don't know if I was or not, but I did it for long enough to understand that I didn't want to do it anymore, in the political climate in the town the way things are as far as housing goes is just really hard—for me.

03-01:49:52 Berglund Sokolov: Let me ask you things like Memorial Day, Veterans Day—other patriotic celebrations—do you feel like a patriot?

03-01:50:06 Mather: I don't like Fourth of July at all. I mean I understand the whole deal, but with the way it's celebrated here, and the rah-rah and the flaggy stuff I don't get— I just don't—I don't like it at all. That nationalistic stuff is a real poison as far as I am concerned. And you know, I was up in Willits, and some guy was still driving around with a big American flag in the back of his truck, and we go holy Christ. I said, "That guy's a mess." He goes, "Oh yeah, well—he ain't making no friends. Don't worry about it." [laughing] You know, but this stuff is everywhere. Yeah sorry, I keep floating around.

03-01:50:46 Berglund Sokolov: How about the trip to Vietnam?

03-01:50:48 Mather: Sure.

03-01:50:51 Berglund Sokolov: What did that feel like for you, to go back—it was just three months ago.

03-01:50:55 Mather: I didn't go back. [laughing]

03-01:50:56 Berglund Sokolov: Or to go, for the first time, three months ago?

03-01:50:58 Mather: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm still dealing with a lot of that trip and trying to walk through it a second time. It's one of the best things I've ever done. I would just say that. I just feel real, real encouraged that I made it through that eighteen-day period without getting sick or anything bad happening. So no, it was just fun, kind of nervy a little bit. You know, I never flew that far, never did that before, and that was the same flight a lot of people took— millions took. For me it was like my—I jokingly said to a friend of mine, Bill, Bill Donotilli, I said, "Hey, Bill—I'll get ahold of you when I come back from my tour in Vietnam." You know, like referring—like I was going to war. It was very, "I bet you never thought you'd hear me say that." [laughing]

Anyway, but generally, it's like that trip was just one thing after another that was opening me up to something new. One thing after every, almost every place—every place we went, every meal we had, every—it was all new. It was all new and fresh. There's something about that I really love. And being treated kindly by virtually—not just a guy opening a door for you or the waiter, but I mean everybody really being nice, and smiling—you feel the warmth and you see the warmth they have for each other. You see men walking down the street holding hands. Or when men have a conversation

they'll hold hands. Yeah, these Army officers are holding hands. You're going, "Okay." It's hard to wrap your head around initially, but—

03-01:53:05 Berglund Sokolov: How did they react to you, knowing that you were a dissenter?

03-01:53:10 Mather: Well, this was interesting. It wasn't always acknowledged or known or talked about in the group, to others, necessarily, unless we got into main conversations, because we're just veterans and we're trying not to draw those lines down the middle, right? But there was in-country vets and there's non- in-country vets, okay? There's a big deal there, okay? But I get respect no matter what, even if they didn't like what I did, okay? So I get respect either way. But the guys and—I keep losing my train of thought.

03-01:53:54 Berglund Sokolov: That's okay. We can go back to the Vietnam piece, and we can kind of wrap up here. How about sharing just maybe some of the lessons that you want people to take from your story?

03-01:54:12 Mather: Well, let me think for a second. Trying to put it into words, I'd say that the choices you make, make you, you know? Make who you are. Early on in life I learned in church and at home, and just through family, that it is not okay to be mean. It is not okay to treat people any different than you want to be treated. It really just isn't. And you need to like put your money on the table and be honest. And this is the way I was raised. Oh sure, I stole candy bars and got in trouble like everybody else. But the thing about it was, it was somehow deep in me. When all this stuff was pushing on me, I had that. I had that. I also had self-respect, because I had worked on that. [laughing] I was a little bit of a snit. I was not going to put up with anything anymore. I guess I had just—got in a lot of trouble as a kid and was rebellious, and my father and I didn't get along too great, so it was a perfect storm, in a sense. I had rebelled and rebelled, I got expelled, I got in street fights, you know— stole cars, raced cars, got tickets, got in an accident—did a lot of stuff. Today, I'd probably be in jail before I made it to the Army, but I wasn't a bad kid. I was just feeling my oats, and those are the things you could get away with back then. Now, you can't.

03-01:56:06 Berglund Sokolov: If there was someone in their twenties who listened to your interview, what might you hope, as a new generation, that they would take away from your story?

03-01:56:18 Mather: Well, there are some obvious things, like it's best if you don't buy into the political rhetoric and patriotic insanity that this country thrives on. It would be a really good idea to reevaluate your decision process before you make any decisions at all that could risk your life—or anyone else's. And also, too,

if you do decide that you're going to go along with the program, you have to understand—you personally will carry the guilt the rest of your life for anything you do. That's it, you know? Don't think this is just going to go away. This doesn't go away—that sure as hell is not going to go away. If you want to preserve your own soul, you might think twice. Everybody's got to make their own choices, and as my father said, you also have to live with them. And sometimes that's a good thing.

03-01:57:26 Berglund Sokolov: So one final question—maybe two. [Mather laughs] How do you feel about being on the Presidio today?

03-01:57:39 Mather: You know, I've been thinking about that, and I would say I'm fine with it. I disassociated the two, the post and the park. I've been conscious to try to always correct myself. I ride through the park on my bicycle probably ten times a month, right? I drive by, or ride by, the post stockade. I spit on the stockade sometimes. [laughing] You know, I call it names sometimes—and other times I think about all the people I met there, and it was a little pressure cooker. Those memories will never leave. So I've got to just give it what it is, which is an old funky building that was evil, and now is not so evil. Yeah, there's probably stuff there. I said to Eileen, I said, "You know, I've lived around here a long time. It would be really nice to live somewhere else." Like I told you, I looked at this church that I can buy in—[sounds of a flock of parrots squawking outside]

03-01:58:54 Berglund Sokolov: There's the parrots.

03-01:58:55 Mather: Nice—in British Columbia for $85,000, I can buy a building for $85,000 anywhere—and that's US. It's $113,000 Canadian. But you know—wow.

03-01:59:12 Berglund Sokolov: What are your hopes for the future?

03-01:59:16 Mather: Hmm. Well, two things—or more. I want to write a book. I know I've got a book in me, so it's just a matter of doing it. But there's been all this stuff in the way, you know? Working eight hours a day really took a lot out of me toward the end of my work life. It just did. Parking your car fifteen or twenty times a day, in San Francisco, is not great. You know, and plus, I had a lot of responsibility and I needed the money, so it was a good thing. Just like I think now that the Presidio has become a park and is giving equal opportunity to everybody who has any history here, I feel a lot more comfortable.

Now, the guys that are coming—I don't know how they're going to feel. And this is one thing I want to set up, is that—over and over, and this is a park,

this is a park, and this is a free place. You can go anywhere you want, you can do this—it's no longer—and have that emphasized. They're going to be going holy Christ, you know, really. I don't know how they're going to deal with looking inside. I don't know how they're going to deal with any of this. I'm going to be real cautious about it, and I've decided that I'm going to try to take charge on Sunday, okay? Because I think I'm really the only one. I've digested all of this stuff. I can help them even.

03-02:00:56 Berglund Sokolov: What are you hoping that visitors take away from that experience?

03-02:01:03 Mather: More, more. [laughing]

03-02:01:03 Berglund Sokolov: Of the fiftieth?

03-02:01:07 Mather: Well, I think that the fact that they're there at all, shows that they have some understanding of it, okay? And some respect for it or curiosity. That's all I require. Whatever they take away, really up to them, depending on what they're looking for. The fact that even fifty years ago there are still guys that still feel like it was a good thing. There are still guys that appreciate each other enough to show up and take advantage of the situation, because I don't think—like I said earlier—I don't think there's anywhere else in the country that could do this. Not really. The fact that it's going to happen, and I'm going to be able to take it to the convention and say, "Okay, look—this is what we're doing." It ends up that the Nine for Peace, the Presidio 27, and that GI march was the beginning of the GI movement here—and maybe across—it was the first GI-organized demonstration in the country. I think we've got props. You know, we do. The fact that it's happening here, the trust is amenable, the museum is welcoming. It's going to be a very weird experience for these guys.

03-02:02:26 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, yeah.

03-02:02:27 Mather: It's just a different world, and that's what I want to emphasize. It's a different world here now.

03-02:02:32 Berglund Sokolov: Are there any final thoughts that you want to share as we wrap up? [Mather laughs] Because I think it's getting to about that time.

03-02:02:43 Mather: Yeah, I know—final thoughts are always good. Well, I will say this. I have a tendency to believe I'm the only living escapee from that building. I carry that around a little bit, because it's somewhat significant, even though I'm

sorry Walter's not around. I don't know about the other guys. I don't know where they are even. So, I'm one of them.

03-02:03:18 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

03-02:03:22 Mather: There was mentioned, at some point in time, that the reason this all happened was because we were all misfits and none of us could deal with anxiety, which is an insult, okay? Number one, it's infantilizing, okay?

03-02:03:39 Berglund Sokolov: Do you remember where that was mentioned?

03-02:03:40 Mather: Yeah, in the foreword to the new book. Yeah.

03-02:03:45 Berglund Sokolov: To Fred Gardner's book?

03-02:03:47 Mather: Horowitz, Horowitz.

03-02:03:48 Berglund Sokolov: The Unlawful Concert?

03-02:03:48 Mather: Yeah, yeah.

03-02:03:49 Berglund Sokolov: Okay.

03-02:03:50 Mather: Yeah. So you know, there's that. There's all these different ways of looking at it. There's all these different perspectives. But the perspectives of the [Presidio] 27 and the ones who were organizing, and the people around them, is that this was a significant event. There were other things that happened that had more people involved, but this, the timing of this during Haight-Ashbury, Nine for Peace, the GI march, the war was heating up, the Tet Offensive, the convention—this was all happening at the same time. Nixon got elected while I was in jail. That made my decision to escape. That's it. I got court-martialed, Nixon got elected—I'm out of here. And the war went on for how long? I came back five years after the war ended. I lived in Canada five years after the war. The war is over, I'm still up there, you know? And a lot of us were. A lot of us got amnesty—a lot of us didn't. I wasn't eligible. So my situation was sentenced prisoner already and escaped, so I had to come back and do time, and I knew that. It was a reluctant attraction, put it that way, but at the same time, the passion for my family, and I wanted the protection of my children, and you know, it was a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff.

03-02:05:34 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

03-02:05:34 Mather: But that's what you do. I don't care what your situation is, your lot in life, if you will. You do what you have to do. You do what you need to do, you do—maybe you make choices that don't always work, but you do what you need to do. You do that—take care of business—so that's what we did.

03-02:05:52 Berglund Sokolov: Okay, so maybe this is a good place to put a period on things and thank you, Keith, for sharing your story.

03-02:06:00 Mather: Oh, no problem. Thank you guys, for allowing me to and putting it down. That's good. You know, maybe, since I've done enough of these or so many of these, maybe eventually I'll be able to edit it down so it's accurate, you know? [laughter] Because there's so many of the stories have elements that are just what the ___ are you talking about? You know, in it, the stories that have been written about it, which is like oh, really? No, no, no, no, no. I'd love to be able to go back to every single one of those persons who wrote that and give them the real deal, and ask them to correct it.

03-02:06:37 Berglund Sokolov: Well, maybe this interview will help with that.

03-02:06:37 Mather: Yeah, well that would be all right.

03-02:06:38 Berglund Sokolov: And at least for people in the future telling your story, they can go back to this.

03-02:06:42 Mather: Well, when somebody other than myself—when I tell it, that's gospel, you know? No, I was there. Fuck you. [laughing] That's the way it's going to be, and I'm going to have a little statement about that too.

03-02:06:56 Berglund Sokolov: Good.

[End of Interview]