Bill Clamurro and I met at Basic Training at Fort Sam Houston in the summer of 1969. We had both recently graduated from college with undergraduate degrees: he from prestigious Amherst in Massachusetts with a degree in English Literature and I from the more provincial University of Texas at Austin where I took a double major in history and German literature. Vietnam was on everyone’s mind then, especially if you were an undergraduate student. The game-changing Tet Offensive had dominated the headlines for most of 1968 bringing the reality of the war into the living rooms of most Americans. U.S. troop numbers had peaked that year at 549,500. Student protests and unrest also filled the evening news. The draft, which supported the large American force abroad, had become a lightning rod for student dissent at home and a preoccupation for those approaching graduation when their student deferments ended. Certainly, for Bill and me, as well as millions of others, the draft experience was an inseparable part of the Vietnam experience, and so this is also part of our story.
By this point, following very different paths, we had each become firmly opposed to the war. What to do? It was a dilemma that we shared with many thousands of our generation. Faced with involuntary participation in a war that we had come to detest, each had to decide for himself: Did duty to country mandate service, even in a bad cause, or was it a higher duty to resist, to evade, or even to desert and by so doing to become, as many deserters and draft evaders did, a man without a country; often reviled and rejected by one’s own family and friends? It was a very personal decision for which there was no right or wrong answer. Everyone had to confront the situation and decide for himself.
The answer for both Bill and me was a compromise. We decided that we would be willing to serve if we could do so as non-combatants. We discovered that the Selective Service law actually provided for this scenario by permitting two types of conscientious objectors: those willing to put on a uniform (1-A-Os) — always a distinct minority — and those only accepting alternative service (1-Os). In both cases, however, one’s reason for application had to be “by reason of religious training and upbringing” and, moreover, one had to be “opposed to all wars,” not just the war at hand. This presented certain quandaries that are dealt with at length in our respective narratives, but for the present, as we look back, we are both surprised by how uninformed we actually were about the broader significance of our status. At the time, 1-A-O status, if granted by our respective draft boards (not a certainty by a long shot!), appeared as an immediate solution to our common dilemma — compulsory service in a war we opposed — and we both took advantage of it. Only later, in the course of writing this book, did the full significance of the 1-A-O story as an important and woefully neglected chapter in the broader history of pacifism in this country begin to sink in. With this growing awareness that we had participated in something quite extraordinary, perhaps even unique in the history of warfare, our purpose and focus began to shift. Our own narratives should serve the larger purpose of enhancing appreciation for the wider 1-A-O story, which, as mentioned, is a story largely forgotten, and, in some instances, intentionally disremembered.
Our relationship had an improbable circularity. We landed in the same Basic Training Class at Fort Sam Houston where our friendship took shape but we ended up by the luck of the draw in the same outfit in Vietnam toward the end of our tours where we were able to share the final chapter of our Vietnam adventure together. After Vietnam, our friendship evolved and deepened, which one statistic can corroborate. We have seen and visited with each other at least once a year in the intervening fifty years even though we have often found ourselves at opposite ends of the country.
It is a common observation: for those who actually experience the horrors of war firsthand, the war never really ends. Most succeed in suppressing the memories sufficiently to go about their lives. Others are not so fortunate and slip into alcoholism, or drug abuse, or a sad state of general dysfunction for the rest of their lives. Bill and I consciously decided to put the war behind us as best we could to pick up with our lives where we had left off, and both were fairly successful in this.
Our friendship post-Vietnam continued to mature along other lines such as our shared interests in literature, politics, travel, family, etc. But at a certain point, as the fiftieth anniversary of our Vietnam service approached, we both sensed a gnawing insistence, a growing need to come to terms in some meaningful way with the war and our connection to it, and we both responded to this need in a personal way. Bill, by now a published poet in his own right as well as a successful scholar of Spanish literature, had rediscovered in an old box tucked away and forgotten in his basement a sheaf of papers, a collection of poems he had written on a typewriter while in Vietnam. His friends encouraged him to publish them, which he did in 2018 as The Vietnam Typescript. For my part, two things revived my interest. The first was a course I designed and taught at the University of Texas called “Dissent in Democracy: The Civil War and Vietnam in Texas,” wherein my students compared dissent in Texas during the two wars with an eye toward identifying certain perennial issues and challenges for any democracy. The second thing was the production by the Bob Bullock Museum in Austin of a five series podcast, The Vietnam Tapes, based on recordings I had made of several Medevac missions, including the one when I was wounded.
Bill and I then decided that we needed to do something jointly in addition to these efforts. This is how our shared project was born. Once we made the commitment, what followed can only be described as an archeology into our own pasts as each of us began to systematically examine old documents and letters that had been stored away gathering dust for decades in odd places. Bill, a prolific letter writer, had kept up a voluminous correspondence with family and friends during his tour of duty. He had also corresponded with Archibald MacLeish, erstwhile poet-laureate and his mentor while at Amherst. Bill discovered that in nearly all instances the recipients of his correspondence had preserved his letters, including even Archibald MacLeish, and this correspondence he has now bequeathed to the MacLeish collection at the Amherst College Library archives.
Our journey of discovery also included reestablishing contact with fellow 1-A-Os whom we had met during Basic and Medical training at Fort Sam, and, in my case, with old comrades from 15th Med (Medevac), 1st Air Cavalry, my final duty station in Vietnam, old comrades with whom we had long since lost contact. We had endeavored to stay in touch with several of our former 1-A-O trainees while in Vietnam through the exchange of letters, the written word being the only means to do so at the time. Out of our Basic class, only four or five had been overtly political in their opposition to the war. The rest had applied on religious grounds, and most of these were Seventh Day Adventists. Thus, the political among us were a minority within a minority, real odd birds within the larger military framework, so naturally we had gravitated to one another. But once the war was over, we — with the exception of Bill and myself — went our separate ways and over time lost touch. To reestablish contact then with old comrades after the span of nearly fifty years was a very personal and even emotional event.
It is our fervent hope that this book, a compendium of our personal narratives, thought essays, and Bill’s poetry, will contribute in a small way to the memory of the extraordinary story of 1-A-O medics. We existed, after all, and our story deserves a seat at the table.
Blurbs:
“This is no simple military memoir. Combining poetry, personal narratives and reflective essays, Kearney and Clamurro weave an ethical challenge into their writing, asking the reader to step into the position of dutifully serving their country in wartime while preserving their commitment to do no harm. The authors provide an unfiltered look into the paradoxes, absurdities, banalities, tragedies, and mundane daily activities to the American military action in Vietnam, always prompting us to consdider how far our consciences would allow us to go. And more trenchantly, asking us what we would sacrifice to maintain our integrity to competing values.”
–Mark R. Teasdale. E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism. Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
jamesckearney.com 