A few Good Men Want Out of the Military

LH: So he didn’t like conscientious objectors?

MP: No, he did not. It is supposed to be a very unbiased thing, but I question how a man who devotes his life to the military can be unbiased or objective in a situation of that sort. He was not very objective. His recommendation at the end of our session together was that I not be discharged as a conscientious objector, even though all these people — the chaplain, the psychiatrist and others — had said I was a sincere religiously oriented person who had all these moral ideas and constantly talked about the Bible.

His conclusion was that I was not a conscientious objector because I didn’t have the theological perspective to draw the conclusions that I did out of the Bible. I had not been to seminary; I was not educated enough to understand these plain, very evident truths about what Jesus taught. Also, I had a friend who was psychologically disturbed, who was discharged from the Marine Corps. The officer somehow made a connection between my friend and me: because he was disturbed, he must have given me these ideas, therefore I must be disturbed. It was really strange. He came out at one point and said that he knew nothing about what he was doing, but he was told to do it, and he was going to do it to the best of his ability. So he recommended that I not be discharged.

His ruling went up the chain of command to Washington. It took four or five months to get to that step, to the point where they finally said, "No." If the investigating officer recommends "No," chances are everybody else up the line is going to say "No" to protect him; it is also for convenience, it seems.

This whole time, I lived my beliefs to the very best of my ability. I refused to work with weapons, refused to work with almost any equipment, was threatened with jail almost daily. I refused to obey any order of any sort that even minutely went against my grain. I just wanted to be left alone, because I felt there was no possible place in the Marine Corps for me to fit in where I wouldn’t be violating my conscience by doing some task. It was a bad situation to go to work every day and be confronted with doing things that just rub your moral fiber like two cheese graters turned upside down at one another.

In the meantime, my wife (who was pregnant) had flown back to California to be in the care of her private doctor. I had not yet received word as to whether or not my discharge was going to be approved or disapproved from Headquarters, Marine Corps. I decided that time was getting too short. I had a letter from her doctor stating that I needed to be with her at this time, that it was critical that I be there for the birth of the child and for my wife’s own emotional and physical well-being. I presented that to my commanding officer and asked him what could be done about it. He said that I would not be allowed to leave. (These kinds of emergency leaves are usually routine.) I left anyway.

I went U.A. (unauthorized absence) to California. When I’d been in California about two days, I learned from my Congressman that my request for discharge as a conscientious objector had been denied, as I expected it would in light of the investigating officer’s recommendation. My wife and I were very frustrated by this time by the whole chain of events. The way the Marine Corps was handling it seemed very unprofessional. They were losing things, misplacing things, and taking their time. We did some lawyer-looking, but we didn’t feel there was anybody in

California that was competent enough in military law to go into the intricacies of conscientious objection and deal with it effectively.

LH: Did you face a court martial for having gone U.A.?

MP: Yes. I returned approximately two months later to North Carolina, where I spent a month working with Bill Sholar at Quaker House before I returned to Camp Lejeune. During that time we contacted Pitt Dickey, a lawyer in Fayetteville who was familiar with the military. He agreed to represent our case in federal court pro bona publico, for a token fee. That was our next alternative, to go to federal court and request a writ of habeas corpus. All that month at Quaker House I was trying to get things cemented up so that when I did turn myself in I’d have some support for what was about to take place.

Turning myself in to the military after being out of it for three months was absolutely the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. There is nothing to compare with the trauma of going back into a prison system like that after you’ve been free for a while. It’s incredible. I spent many nights crying myself to sleep. I was scared to death. They have the power to lock you away and lose the key. They can do that. They didn’t do that with me, but there have been cases where that’s happened.

LH: Why didn’t they arrest you right then?

MP: Because I had turned myself in, for one thing, and they did not feel that I was much of an escape risk. Also, I had a lot of support behind me at that time. Were they to arrest me, a lot of civilian people outside their little world would know about it.

LH: Were they aware that you had contacted a lawyer and had been at Quaker House?

MP: Yes. We made very sure that they were aware of that, just for that specific purpose.

LH: Were they hassling you in any other way?

MP: Their attitude was, "Just go back to work and carry on as if nothing happened." I got lectured by anybody who had more stripes than I did about what I did wrong and why I did it. "You shouldn’t have done that," etc. Big babysitting service they run over there, I guess. Many of my closest friends were amazed that I had turned myself in. My friends were very supportive of what I was doing, although they were afraid to speak out openly against the Marine Corps. In private they were very much hoping that I could do what I had started out to do, to get out of the Marine Corps, to fight the system and win. They were all looking for one person to stand up and knock the wall down.

Then I was court-martialed, a special court-martial. That is a federal trial done in the military, with a judge and a jury of five officers, who are supposed to be your peers.

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