A few Good Men Want Out of the Military

LH: Were you established as a conscientious objector by this time?

MP: Well, unofficially. Kind of a non-conformist to their system. Somebody who was going to cause trouble.

LH: Did they single you out for punishment or humiliation especially for this?

MP: Oh yeah. You get that all the time. I had a "smile" problem as a result of the fact that I knew what I was doing and what I was saying was more right than what they were teaching me. I got to the point where I believed that it was a big silly game, and I was not going to cooperate with it. I laughed and I smiled about a lot of things because of that attitude of mine. And that was very punishable.

LH: They didn’t want you to smile?

MP: No smiling, no talking. It is very strict, very disciplined, very regimented. "You will breathe when we tell you to breathe; you will walk when we tell you to walk; you will brush your teeth when we tell you to brush your teeth. You will not ask questions. Do what you’re told when you’re told to do it and exactly how you’re told to do it!" For three, four, five months for some people, that’s constantly being bombarded into them. When they come out, they’re no different than robots.

I went a long time, over a year in the Marine Corps, rebelling and yet going along with the system. I was still studying, still trying to learn why I felt like this. I found support for my feelings daily in my readings through the Bible. Through that I continued to grow stronger and stronger in my belief that just exactly what I was doing was wrong. I couldn’t justify what I was being trained to do to myself, or fit it into my commitment that I had made to Christ.

LH: They allowed you to have a Bible?

MP: Oh yeah. They encourage it, as a matter of fact. You’re not supposed to read it, and you’re not supposed to do what it says, but it’s good propaganda. It looks good for all their little recruits to have the little green Bibles they issue you in basic training. But you’re not encouraged to practice what it preaches. If you do you’re labeled a radical and an extremist.

It took me close to a year to come to a point where I was ready to say, "Okay, enough." I had gotten married by this time, and as a result of that, I’d say, I became much more aware of other human beings. I knew that we should all love one another, rather than say, "There’s some Russian over here who’s called the enemy, and he needs to be destroyed because he’s the enemy." I began to look at things more like, "He has feelings like I have feelings; he has a wife like I have a wife. He wants to go home to her like I want to go home to my wife. He doesn’t want to come home to find his village bombed and destroyed and his life shattered, any more than I do." I began to take a kind of world-wide look at the situation. It was at that point when I came to the conclusion that I didn’t care what others said about whether or not I was a conscientious objector. I couldn’t continue to do what I was doing anymore.

I was stationed at Marine Corps Air Station, New River, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, at this time. My wife and I were living off base, as far as we could get away, to avoid the military. That wasn’t easy in Jacksonville. I could confidently say that if the Marine Corps were to move out of Jacksonville, that town would dry up and blow off the map. There are something like twenty thousand civilians and fifty thousand military and dependents.

At that point it was like an eight to five workday for me, with two hours off at lunch when I could go home. My job consisted of repairing components of helicopters. Little black boxes, turrets, flight control systems would need electrical repair. But it wasn’t often that we had much to do. There’s no intellectual stimulation at all in jobs like that, and mine was one of the better jobs that one could qualify for in the Marine Corns.

In the infantry units, what they do most of the time is put forty-pound packs on their backs, take their M-16 rifles and

helmets — they look just like GI Joe dolls — and march off twenty, thirty miles to pick up trash. They stuff it in their packs and return. They empty their packs, go to sleep at night, and do the same thing in the morning.

One day I was browsing through a bookstore in town, and I found a book written in cooperation with the American Civil Liberties Union. In the back, it had a number of organizations that I could write to for information about problems and hassles I had with the military. C.C.C.O.’ was listed, so I contacted their office in San Francisco about a problem I was having. (I had never received the bonus I had been promised for going into my particular field.) C.C.CO. sent back a lot of literature, including some on all kinds of discharges.

After reading their booklet, I determined that, yes, I was a conscientious objector even if I would still use force to defend somebody. My idea of using force to defend my family would not rule me out legally as a conscientious objector. I ended up calling the C.C.C.O. office in Philadelphia and talking to them about it. They told me about Quaker House2 in Fayetteville and about Bill Sholar3, and that I could go and talk to him.

LH: What kind of help did you get at Quaker House?

MP: When I first went there, I was confused about the regulations about conscientious objection. The military was telling me one thing; the literature and correspondence that I received from C.C.C.O. [The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors] told me something else. I went to Bill Sholar to get the straight story. If I was a C.O. I wanted to find out how to go about submitting an application for discharge as a C.O. I thought there was a form you could fill out; there isn’t. They just ask you about thirty questions, and you write down your own answers to them.

LH: Who asks you these questions?

MP: There are regulations in the military to deal with conscientious objectors that contain these questions. You just answer the questions however you want to. This comprises your application. You submit that to your commanding officer, your company commander, or whoever, and thereby declare yourself a conscientious objector. It didn’t take me long to write the application up — maybe a week. I had spent the last two years thinking about it. It was thirty or forty pages long, in detail enough to explain my views and ideas. So it was on my commanding officer’s desk within a week. That was in October, 1978.

LH: Are these regulations in a book that is accessible to all Marines?

MP: It is supposedly accessible to everybody. I got a copy of the regulations from Bill Sholar. That kind of shocked them at camp. They wanted to know where I got a copy. When I told them, they couldn’t understand how a civilian organization could have a copy of THEIR regulations. And the regulations I got from Bill were much more up-to-date than the ones they had at camp!

It was a big surprise. It was like a bomb I dropped! The knowledge I had acquired from talking with Bill and from reading about conscientious objection just overwhelmed them. They did not know what to do next. So I found myself in the position of trying to explain to them what their next step was. That complicated things, because in the Marine Corps an enlisted man does not tell an officer how to do things.

Basically what happened next was I had to go and see a chaplain, a psychiatrist, and an investigating officer. But THEY didn’t realize this, so I went voluntarily. The interviews with the chaplain and the psychiatrist went pretty smoothly. It took about two weeks to get those out of the way.

Bill had predicted a time frame of about three months for the whole shebang to be over. My wife and I were very anxious to get if over with as quickly as possible so we could return to California and be normal human beings again, rather than robots.

After my interviews an investigating officer had to be appointed by the command. His job was basically to get all the acts together, talk to people, and make a judgment about whether I was a sincere conscientious objector and whether my beliefs followed the criteria set down in the Marine Corps order. Then he had to make a report to his boss, who had to report to HIS boss, and it had to go to Washington for a final decision.

The investigating officer that I came in contact with had no knowledge of conscientious objection and had his own beliefs and ideas already formulated about who a conscientious objector is.

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