(joyful guitar music) - Hello, and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is James Kearney, co-author of "Duty to Serve, Duty to Conscience: The Story of Two Conscientious Objector Combat Medics during the Vietnam War."

Jim, thank you so much for being here.

- It's my pleasure.

Thank you.

- Well, the title does a pretty good job of telling us what this book is about, but could you give us a brief introduction and and tell us about the book?

- Yeah, my co-author and I were 1-A-O conscientious objectors and people say and we were, at the same time, we were a living contradiction, you might say, because we were conscientious objectors, but we were also combat medics.

And people say, what?

What do you mean?

If you're conscientious objectors, how can you be combat medics?

Well, this particular classification, which goes back to the Selective Service Act of 1940, which was operative all the way up through the Vietnam War, allowed for a particular class of conscientious objectors who felt a duty to serve, but also a duty to conscience, hence the title.

They were not only willing to serve, in some cases, their particular belief systems, and I'm thinking specifically of the Seventh-day Adventist, a mandated service.

Actually, the classification was probably designed with them in mind to begin with and for those of you who know the movie "Hacksaw Ridge" about Desmond Doss, one of the most decorated soldiers in World War II in the Pacific Theater.

He was a Seventh-day Adventist 1-A-O.

So, you know, that's where the title comes from.

And, you know.

- I wanna talk a little bit more about the status of the 1-A-O and the conscientious objector because historically, I think, or most people, they think of it, they think of just complete, you know, as you say, they oppose war, like the Quakers, you know, have this kind of longstanding understanding that they don't wanna be involved at all.

They're opposed to all wars.

But this is kind of a gray area or like a subcategory even.

- It is, it is, and it was one that actually caused a lot of hand wringing on the part of the higher ups and the Selective Service System, and also in the US Army.

And we maintain, and this is a novel interpretation, that this hand wringing contributed to the demise of the draft in 1973.

But that's another topic.

But you're right, there were two classifications for conscientious objectors and they were 1-O and 1-A-O.

The great majority of conscientious objectors were 1-Os, which means they did not, they were not willing to put on a uniform and they did alternative service outside of the military, usually in work camps or on farms, or they built trails in national parks, et cetera.

These people, however, this was reserved for people from historic pacifist church and you named the Quakers, but we should also mention the Mennonites and the Amish and a host of smaller ones, but those are the most important ones.

And they constituted about 90% of all 1-Os, of conscientious objectors.

So we were a minority.

We were about 10%.

And then, however, what is unusual about Bill and I's situation is we were a minority within a minority.

- That was gonna be my next question.

- Because by the terms of the Selective Service Act there were two absolute prerequisites.

You had to be opposed to, or your status had to be based by way of religious upbringing.

In other words, it had to be religious-based and beyond that, you really had to have come from a church that was recognized as historically pacifistic.

I mean, Baptist and Methodist and Catholics were routinely turned down because they're not considered a historic pacifist church.

The second requirement was that you had to be opposed to all wars, not just the war at hand.

These were the bedrock principles.

However, and that worked to perfection in World War II and even in Korea, but the whole system began to fall apart, the wheels came off in Vietnam.

And these requirements were prejudiced by Supreme Court decisions, the most famous of which was Muhammad Ali versus the United States.

And there were others, Seger and some other Supreme Court which opened the door for a new breed of conscientious objector, whose beliefs were more personal, more ethical or political than religious.

And Bill and I fall into that category, you see.

And so we were always, even at the time of the Vietnam War, when we were inducted, we were then maybe 10% of the 1-A-Os, but there's no way to really quantify this.

It's just a rough guess based on my basic training class.

There were 22 of us and four of us were political out of that 22.

So our story, you know, our story is completely different.

I mean, our experience of the war filtered through a different sensibility than even our fellow 1-A-O medics who were religious.

You see what I'm saying?

It was a completely different experience, and nothing has been written.

So this is the first book that tells our story.

And we were on the periphery, so to speak, but we existed.

So, our story deserves to be told, too.

- Absolutely and it's like you say, it's such a unique perspective there.

Unfortunately, a lot of men went to Vietnam and then later felt the need to write about their experiences and tell their stories.

But this is the perspective I hadn't seen or hadn't read before.

So I think it is important that it adds to that literature.

- Well, I agree.

And you see, Bill and I, Clamurro, my co-author, Bill Clamurro, we met at basic training.

We went through what was called AIT, Advanced Individual Training where you learn to be a medic.

Our classification was 21B20 and then we all went to Vietnam.

We got our orders.

That was very interesting because not all people who were trained as medics went to Vietnam.

A lot went to Germany or Korea, but it was obvious that they sent all of us to Vietnam.

I'm not quite sure why that was the case, but I have an idea, but maybe I'll get into that later.

But anyway, what I wanted to say is after the war was over, Bill and I kind of decided to put the war behind us as best we could.

You can never completely do this, you know, but we tried and we went on with our lives and we had forged a friendship, although we come from completely different backgrounds, and we have seen each other at least once every year for the last 50 years.

I mean, just to sum it up, Bill was the best man at my wedding, the godfather to my first child, when my daughter, his goddaughter, got married, we dressed him up in his doctoral robes and bought him a degree down in The Bahamas and he performed the service.

He married my daughter legally, you see?

So it goes way back.

But at a certain point, independently, really, Bill and I felt like we needed to come to terms with our experience.

And this is, by the way, is a very common situation with people, that toward the end, this is the most intense experience of our life and we somehow needed to come to terms with it.

And we approached it differently independently.

Bill is a poet as well as a professor of Hispanic literature, now, professor emeritus, a published scholar, but also a poet who has published several volumes of poetry.

And he published the book called "Vietnam Type Script," which were poems that he had written while in Vietnam.

For my part, I had made tape recordings as a medevac medic, including the mission where I was severely wounded.

I have all that on tape.

And the Bob Bullock Museum in Austin found out about this and they wanted to produce a podcast and they did a five-series podcast based on these tapes, which, by the way won a national gold medal for the best podcast produced by a museum in the United States for the year 2019.

It's still available and online if you wanna listen to it.

It's called "Vietnam on Tape."

Anyway, we did these things independent, but then I was actually approached by a editor of a university press, the University of North Texas, Ron Chrisman, and he said, "if you ever want to write your story, I guarantee you, we'll publish it."

And I got to thinking, I said, well, you know, there's been a thousand books about Vietnam.

What do I have to contribute?

But the more I thought about it for the reasons I outlined, I felt like, well, maybe our story deserves a place at the table.

But then I realized as I thought about it that I could not write this book without Bill because there was a certain circularity, you see.

We started in basic training, we went through medics training and by the luck of the draw, we ended up eventually for the last four or five months of our service in the same outfit in Vietnam in the first air cab.

Bill was a medic in the, you know, in the aid station on base and I was a medic on he on helicopters.

But he happened to be on duty, you see, when I got wounded.

And so he gave me first aid, which consisted in the first instance of a cold beer.

(Christine chuckling) So that, if nothing else, forged a lifelong friendship.

So you see, when I approached Bill and I said, you know, maybe we should write up our story, but would you be interested?

And he said, "yes."

And so that was the inception of the book and we worked for two or three years on it, went through the peer review process and all that, and finally it came out.

It's not perfect, but we're proud of it because by God, we got it done.

We hope of course that it sells a lot of books and gains a lot of attention, but that's not really important in the final analysis.

It is that, you know, we came to terms with our experience.

That's what's important.

- And I really love the dual memoir approach because your your voice, like you say, your voices and your experiences compliment each other.

I wanna mention that several of Bill's poems are featured in the book, and that just adds a richness and a texture to the book that you don't see in a lot of of books like this.

- Well, absolutely.

We think so.

But this is kind of a funny story because our editor, Ron Chrisman, of UNT Press, he scratched his head and said, "I've never done anything like this."

(Christine laughing) You know, this mixture, this blending of our two narratives, and by the way, my narrative begins here at Texas A&M.

We might get into that at some point.

But his narrative and then goes through, for me, the process of becoming from, I'm a country boy, I grew up on a ranch in Texas, very rural background, and I still make my home on the family ranch, by the way, and so it was a real sort of journey for me to come from a very conservative rural background to by degrees, become radicalized and opposed to the war.

Bill's journey was different.

He came from a very sophisticated East Coast family.

He's a Ivy leaguer, he went to Amherst.

He was a mentor.

I mean, he was a protege, I should say, of Archibald MacLeish, erstwhile Poet Laureate of the United States.

They corresponded, by the way, when he was in Vietnam.

So I tell my story of not just my experiences in Vietnam, which are exciting enough, but of my journey from being in the core animal here at Texas A&M, transferring to the University of Texas, starting my academic career in the most conservative piece of earth, a plot of earth in Texas and then transferring to the most liberal (Christine laughing) and radical 'cause the University of Texas was the epicenter of anti-war sentiment, you know, about at that time.

And then we tell our stories, and we were both outside the wire, that is to say we were embedded in combat units outside the big base camps.

He was with a tank company, I started with an artillery unit.

Then I was attached to the 2nd and 27th Wolfhounds in the Cambodian invasion, and then I ended up as a medevac medic for the first aircraft.

And so, you know, there's lots of stories to tell about our combat experiences, and we do.

And of course, I ended up being severely wounded with only a few days left before I was scheduled for D Ross, we call it, a return back to the States.

So I tell that story, of course, as well.

- Can you talk about, I mean, obviously you had your personal memories and maybe some letters and things, but what other research did you have to do or did you do to put the book together?

- Yes.

Well, I'm glad you asked that because it was a journey of discovery.

And the first thing that we discovered was there was almost no information.

And this baffled us.

So, you know, we went to Fort Sam Houston where all medics are trained, by the way now, then it was Army, but now it's, whether you're Army, Navy, Air Force, you go to Fort Sam in San Antonio and they have a fantastic museum there.

It's called the Museum of Army Medicine.

This is a multimillion dollar facility.

And they have an archives.

And we were floored to find out there was not one word, not one mention of the 1-A-Os who trained at Fort Sam, who fought in all the wars, I mean, in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, who died by the hundreds, two or three, I mean, Desmond Doss is the poster child, Congressional Medal of Honor.

Two of us won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam.

And we died, you know, in greater numbers as medics did because it was a dangerous job, yet not one mention, not one word.

And then we went to the archives and there was nothing in the archives.

There were no muster rolls.

We couldn't find out the basic information.

How many went through?

Were there, you know, thousands?

But I have to give a shout out for the archivist there, Carlos Alvarado, the head archivist, and he was shocked too.

But he became very helpful to us.

And he turned us on to a doctoral dissertation by a lady named Jean Mann Savage, who wrote a blurb on the back of the book, by the way, and who came up with the title.

- [Christine] That's wonderful.

- Jean did and she wrote her doctoral dissertation about conscience objectors in Vietnam here at the University, at Texas A&M.

So she's a doctoral, she got her doctorate here.

That is the only scholarly work we could find.

And so we base our facts and figures and of course, attribute her in the book.

And from her, we learned there were about 10,000 of us who served in Vietnam.

How many died, how many...

There's no record anywhere, we don't know.

But from our class of 22, 4 were killed and we don't know how many were wounded.

So I mean, you can see, it's a substantial casualty rate for one year of service.

But then also Bill and I went to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and we spent a lot of time doing research in the Selective Service files and we found a lot of information there.

Now, not specifically about how many of us served, but about the internal debates within the Selective Service System, the congressional committees and the US Army and the hand wringing that went on about this new breed of conscientious objector, whom they were absolutely paranoid about.

You see, because if you're a Quaker or a Seventh-day Adventist or somebody like that in the Army, the Army is not afraid of that.

You see, you're not going to be a threat to morale.

You're just sort of quaint and you're here because you wanted to be, you want to do your duty, so they welcome these people.

But here's a new breed who are political, ethical, and they think of us as maybe perhaps a cancer that can metastasize.

I mean, that we will spread, we will undermine morale.

But one of the points of our book is that that is not what happened.

We made a bargain with the Army, you see, and by and large, the Army lived up to their side of the deal and we lived up to our side of the deal.

It was a compromise, you see, we can't claim no moral high ground.

We were willing to serve and we probably helped the war effort.

But we had made a bargain and we were not only conscientious objectors, we were conscientious medics.

And there's not one instance that we know of of a 1-A-O medic who was political in any way being subser- What's the word?

- Subversive.

- Subversive.

(Christine laughing) Or promoting insurrection or undermining morale in Vietnam.

- You highlight in the book a specific experience where there was some anti-war graffiti and things being murmured about in the camp.

- Yeah, I was briefly at a base camp- - And you were kind of singled out for that.

- That's right and it's very interesting because there were all of a sudden graffiti started appearing all across the base, you know, peace signs and slogans, et cetera.

But it was even more serious than that.

There was an instance of fragging where somebody booby-trapped the hooch of an officer and killed him.

And so I was arrested by the MPs and subjected to an interrogation by military intelligence and during which it, became evident that they had extensive files on me going back to my days as a student at UT when I had attended an SDS conference.

I was never a member of the- SDS, by the way, stands for Students for a Democratic Society, which was the most active anti-war organization on all the campuses across the United States.

And the FBI and other military intelligence were absolutely paranoid about them.

And they confronted me with that and they'd also been reading my mail, but I was in no way involved or had no inkling of it, no connection with any of this, and if somebody had approached me to be, I would not have done it.

You see, I would not have, because like I say, we had made a bargain, and we intended to live up to our side of the bargain.

- I think one of the most interesting chapters is one of the last ones where your co-author talks about kind of the greater meaning of what it meant to be your status and how that idea, with no more draft, that thought has kind of faded away.

- Yeah.

So the blending in the book, in addition to the poetry and our narratives, we have Bill's thought essay called "The Conscience That Was Lost."

And, you know, we began to reflect on the unique situation, our unique status.

It didn't really dawn on us, to tell the truth, until much later that this was really something perhaps unique in the history of warfare to have a consciousness against the war embedded in the very center of war.

You see, there have been conscientious objectors before, but they had served as grave diggers or, you know, mule skinners or whatever.

They were on the periphery, they were not embedded in the war itself in combat units.

And we cannot find another instance of this.

And especially those of us who had arrived at our beliefs through our own journeys, ethical journeys, rather than through received religion.

And so we said, you know when the draft was abolished by Nixon and Congress in 1973, something very meaningful was lost.

And we began to rethink the whole idea of national service.

You see, we hated the draft with... We loathed, hated, and despise the draft at the time, but we've sort of rethought that, our position.

And, you know, you have debts to to repay in this life.

You know, you have a debt to your creator, a debt to your parents, and you have a debt to your country.

How do you already repay, excuse me, that debt?

And we begin to think that maybe some form of national service is in fact a good thing.

But once again, if the draft were to be reintroduced, you would once again have to define who qualifies for a conscientious objector status.

You know?

And it's a thorny question.

And I might mention a sort of companion book to the one I wrote here, or we wrote.

I translated a Texas German novel called "The 48ers on Possum Creek."

And Possum Creek stands for Mulheim, Texas, which isn't all that far from here.

And it is a book about the dilemma of educated Germans in Texas during the Civil War who were opposed to secession and/or slavery and they didn't want to fight for the Confederacy.

And then the south introduced a draft, or conscription as it was called, for the first time in 1862 and there had never been a draft in the United States before then.

So the story is that the young man, Kuno, is coming of age, he's turned 18, and he's confronted with the draft and he's torn between his beloved teacher who is extracted from him the promise that under no circumstances will he put on a uniform for the Confederacy and his own father, who is also opposed to secession, but who feels like it is his duty to fight for his country, even if in a bad cause.

But this is fundamentally the same situation that Bill and I faced in Vietnam, and the draft is the common denominator.

And so I think these books compliment each other and I might mention that I teach a class at the University of Texas called Descent and Democracy, the Civil War in Vietnam and Texas and I compare these two situations in the class.

- Unfortunately, we've run outta time here, but I would hope people pick up the book, listen to your podcast, and also read this other book to really see that this is a longstanding dilemma.

- It is a perennial challenge for democracy.

The questions raised are thorny, but they are perennial.

- Exactly.

It's the human condition.

- Yeah.

- Well, thank you so much for joining us, for telling us your story.

I really appreciate you coming.

- It was my pleasure.

- The book again, is "Duty to Serve, Duty to Conscience."

Thank you so much for joining us and I will see you again soon.

(gentle music)