“Small moveable forts and magazines”

by David Benjamin

“… You may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed… ”

— Henry David Thoreau

MADISON, Wis.— It was a silent bus. Thinking back now, this was remarkable, because all of us were teenagers. Just shy of my twentieth birthday, I was probably the oldest passenger. It was 1969. We were on route from the North End to the Boston Army Base. 

I didn’t recognize any of these boys but most of them knew me—or of me. I had courted constant danger in that neighborhood from these very boys, who saw the intrusion of outsiders,“hippies,” as grounds for violence. I’d been jostled, insulted, threatened, assaulted, slugged, even chased through the streets. Although I shared these kids’ working-class roots, I was alien among them for many reasons. 

I was the only non-Italian rider on the bus, the only one who hadn’t lived from birth in an ethnic enclave bounded by Hanover and Commercial Streets and the great wall of the Southeast Expressway. Unlike all these kids, I’d been to college, and I had gotten several 2-S student deferments from the military draft. Normally tough and wary, these kids were anxious and quiet, resigned to a process that would feed them through a bureaucratic strip-search followed by boot camp, numeration, dehumanization and a meatgrinder in Southeast Asia. Unique in this group, I was unwilling to comply. I belonged to the Boston Draft Resistance Group, whose leader, Scott, was a Harvard student and a high-school friend. 

Eventually, months after shuffling through my physical exam at the Army Base, I was granted grudging status as a conscientious objector (CO). I did my “service” in a Boston hospital, rather than in the swamps, jungles and firebases of Vietnam. As a CO, I was at least technically more allied with the anti-war movement than those young men, like my North End busmates, who lacked the wherewithal, or the sheer dumb luck, to keep themselves out of what is often called—with cruel irony—harm’s way. But I had never rallied, never marched, never struck, protested or rioted. I merely resisted.

Today, with Selective Service a distant memory, resistance is moot and controversy is mute. Lately, it’s conventional for the media to label all servicemen and women “heroes,” even if—like my kid brother Bill in Desert Storm—all they ever did in the war was “dispatch trucks and hunt for a clean toilet.” In 1969, kids who got drafted weren’t deemed heroic. My busmates and I, more accurately—and we knew it, even the meekest, most patriotic Prince Street spaghetti-boy among us—were cannon fodder on a tumbril to the gallows. One or more of us might eventually distinguish himself as a hero and might return, decked with medals, to the North End. More of these kids, losers in the in-country crap shoot, would depart the neighborhood forever, their names etched into a shiny black wall with a mediocre view of the Washington Monument. 

I’d actually been in the resistance for a while, starting in tenth grade when the carnage and obscenity of the Vietnam war penetrated my teenage focus on algebra and chemistry, high-school football and a girl named Linda. I had no idea then that my life would eventually depend on my answer to the draft board’s 64,000-death question: Was I willing to go to Leavenworth rather than go to war?

I was against war (especially this war, my war). So, when they asked, I said, “Yes.” They believed me. But opposed though I was to this futile faraway fight, I’d never felt a flicker of animus toward the fighters. Looking around the bus at kids who—back on Charter Street—were prone to beat the shit out of me, all I could feel was a reluctant empathy. Dylan’s Masters of War had stripped us to our BVDs and erased our antipathies. Queued and bewildered, none of us thought to defy the command—our first order in the U.S. Army—to turn our heads and cough. 

The silence of the boys on the bus was, in a way, the voice of war. I had grown up in a small town where almost every male had been in “the service” and had been shipped off to some bloodbath somewhere. But few ever talked about it. My dad painted houses and pasted up wallpaper alongside Al Zinsmeister, who had left an arm somewhere in Europe. Al made jokes about being a one-armed paperhanger but never shared a single memory of combat. My Uncle Harry had been a doughboy in battles at Amiens and the Meuse-Argonne, but all he ever talked about was the fun he had in Paris after it was over, over there.

In my newspaper days, I learned that a friend, a high school English teacher named Bob, had taken part in the liberation of a Nazi death camp. He declined to tell me that story, nor had he shared it with anyone, not even his family. All I could do, in response to his silence, was acquiesce and feel the same empathy I’d felt before—among those Da Nang-bound North End kids on the bus, and toward the mystery of Al Zinsmeister’s missing arm.

There were zealots in my generation. They scorned, vehemently, the non-college bound kids who accepted their 1-A and consigned their fate to God, Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Westmoreland. There are stories—mostly apocryphal—of “hippies” spitting on soldiers in airports. I did no scorning or spitting, because I had uncles, neighbors, classmates who had “served” perhaps not gladly or “patriotically,” but dutifully, unavoidably. The unspoken option was Leavenworth. 

Even when I was little, I knew better than to see romance or glory in the military “service” of ordinary guys who had come home from Hell, damaged and reticent, but glad to be alive. One of my very first essays, in ninth grade, was a satire of “Sgt. Rock” comics, in whose pages every soldier is a “combat-happy joe” and in which its superhero noncom—every episode—charges pell-mell toward a blazing machine-gun nest, bounding over barbed-wire and bomb-craters, unscathed by a hail of bullets (“Vip!” “Bwee!”), eventually beating Nazi soldiers to death with their own helmets.

I knew combat wasn’t happy and that Sgt. Rock would have gotten himself killed in a real war before he even reached the beach. I knew that service was, for the most part, not a calling but an obligation best avoided, if possible. The draft was an ominous fact of life for me and every other man and boy I knew. 

We knew that Uncle Sam didn’t just want us. He was out to get us, and, if necessary, he was going to kill us and turn his back before our bodies were cold. To Sgt. Rock and Uncle Sam, Thoreau had long since asked his own 64,000-death question: “Now, what are they? Men at all? Or small moveable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?”

And so, on the bus, I found momentary brotherhood with the North End bullies who otherwise hated and hunted me. Against my will, I was likewise connected to every soldier, anywhere, who had lived—Vip! Bwee!—or died, and to every resister or draft-dodger who had hunkered down in college, fled to Canada, or put in two years pushing patients around Deaconess Hospital. 

I empathized with my busmates because, suddenly, all together, we were finished with being boys. Like all of us, only moreso in that terrible time of war, each of my fellow North End draftees was a blind pawn in the grip of forces beyond his control or imagination, victim of a fickle fate that would change his life forever—or end it before Christmas. 

Just beneath my consciousness that day, I had a sense that this tense and sullen bus trip was how passengers felt on Charon’s ferry, peering into the darkness toward the far shore of the Styx.