Days of Decision : An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors in the Military During the Vietnam War
"A collection which will especially interest students of peace and military values systems."             --Midwest Book Review, Summer 1989"A patchwork quilt of conscience woven with tangled threads of duty and morality. Required reading for local Board of Education candidates."             --Veterans For Peace Newsletter, Fall 1989"A singular study. Readers will find renewed or strengthened faith in the human potential."             --Catholic Peace Fellowship Bulletin, Summer 1990"A tribute to those men who stood up for what they believed in and persevered in the face of hostility and harassment."             --New Haven Advocate, August 1989"DAYS OF DECISION should become standard reading in college level peace studies classes.  An exemplary demonstration of the socially conscious use to which oral history techniques can be put."             --Oral History Review, March 1991"Each story is different...some humorous episodes.  This book deserves equal time and space on the shelf." --Kliatt Book Guide, May 1989"Major antiwar literature."--Booklist Starred Review, March 1989"Moving and provocative work."             --Small Press, February 1990This moving and provocative work is the story of a series of ironies. Vietnam's uniformed conscientious objectors were products of a conscription system based on a premise of national mobilization for total war and an ethic stressing civic responsibilities. That system was spectacularly ill-adapted to the demands of a policy war in an era increasingly affirming individual rights-particularly a war whose purposes were obscure at even the highest levels of policy-making. Most of the men who tell their stories in these pages began from a simple and defensible basic premise: They saw no good reason why they should serve in Vietnam, and their country offered them none. The next irony began with the bureaucratized application of Selective Service rules demanding objection to war in any form as the principal criterion for CO status. Those unable to satisfy the requirement found themselves in the armed services. But the process of developing and presenting their cases to the Selective Service System transformed inchoate emotions into value systems strong enough to resist both informal cajoling and any overt pressure, up to court-martial and prison. the military was willing or able to apply to dissenters in uniform.  One point emerging from these pages, though the contributors and the editor alike would vehemently deny it, is the relative moderation and common sense with which these protestors were treated on the whole while in service. The military's ultimate functions are collective and public. Private needs and grievances play secondary roles. Conscripts, moreover, are, by definition, unwilling soldiers. It was not the military's responsibility to determine who should serve in uniform. Once that decision had been made, there were no abstract grounds for recognizing some protests rather than others, particularly when the stakes could be mortal. Yet--and here is the final irony--exposure to the claims and demands of a total institution often meant that what began as selective objection to a particular war evolved into a principled rejection of war itself. the original officially-approved requisite of conscientious objection. --FromIndependent Publisher