My life

I work for a Lieutenant Colonel. I am his bodyguard. . . . On the 21st of November we came to a place called Winchester. Our helicopter let us off and the Colonel, myself, and two other men started looking over the area . . . there were two NVAs [North Vietnamese Army soldiers] in a bunker, they opened up on us. . . . The Colonel got hit and the two others were hit. Bill, that day I prayed. Fortunately I got the two of them before they got me. I killed my first man that day. And Bill, it’s an awful feeling, to know you took another man’s life. It’s a sickening feeling. And then you realize how it could have been you just as easily.

The next day, January 13, I went to London for my draft exam. The doctor declared me, according to my fanciful diary notes, “one of the healthiest specimens in the western world, suitable for display at medical schools, exhibitions, zoos, carnivals, and base training camps.” On the fifteenth I saw Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, which was “my second surrealistic experience in as many days.” Albee’s characters forced the audience “to wonder if some day near the end they won’t wake up and find themselves hollow and afraid.” I was already wondering that.

President Nixon was inaugurated on January 20. His speech was an attempt at reconciliation, but it “left me pretty cold, the preaching of good old middle-class religion and virtues. They will supposedly solve our problems with the Asians, who do not come from the Judeo-Christian tradition; the Communists, who do not even believe in God; the blacks, who have been shafted so often by God-fearing white men that there is hardly any common ground left between them; and the kids, who have heard those same song-and-dance sermons sung false so many times they may prefer dope to the audacious self-delusion of their elders.” Ironically, I believed in Christianity and middle-class virtues, too; they just didn’t lead me to the same place. I thought living out our true religious and political principles would require us to reach deeper and go further than Mr. Nixon was prepared to go.

I decided to get back into my own life in England for whatever time I had left. I went to my first Oxford Union debate—Resolved: that man created God in his own image, “a potentially fertile subject poorly ploughed.” I went north to Manchester, and marveled at the beauty of the English countryside “quilted by those ancient rock walls without mortar or mud or cement.” There was a seminar on “Pluralism as a Concept of Democratic Theory,” which I found boring, just another attempt “to explain in more complex (therefore, more meaningful, of course) terms what is going on before our own eyes. . . . It is only so much dog-dripping to me because I am at root not intellectual, not conceptual about the actual, just damn well not smart enough, I reckon, to run in this fast crowd.”

On January 27, the actual reared its ugly head again, as a few of us threw a party for Frank Aller on the day he officially became a draft resister, “walking along the only open road.” Despite the vodka, the toasts, the attempts at humor, the party was a bust. Even Bob Reich, easily the wittiest of us, couldn’t make it work. We simply could not lift the burden from Frank’s shoulders “on this, the day when he put his money where his mouth was.” The next day Strobe Talbott, whose draft status was already 1-Y