Spirit in Action

J.E. McNeil/Center on Conscience & War

J.E. McNeil, of the Center on Conscience & War describes the message and work of that organization, helping those seeking conscientious objector status, and those in the military seeking to get out, whatever the reason, and the spiritual roots that led her to this work.

Duration:: 58m
Broadcast on:: 19 Feb 2006
Audio Format:: mp3

I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from this struggle and weak from growing old. I have no voice but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give or make it and the more. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue through you and will be done. The enders have my none to help and die. Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind. My guest today on Spirit in Action is J. E. McNeil. She's the Executive Director of the Center on Conscience and War in Washington, D.C. an organization helping those seeking conscientious objector status and helping those in the military seeking to procure their rights. J. E. will share her spiritual journey from her childhood in the Methodist Church in Texas to her current membership with the Friends Meeting of Washington. Welcome to Spirit in Action. J. E. how are you doing today? Well, I'm pretty good, a little cranky, but surviving. Well, I'm sure considering that you work to help all these people get conscience objector status, you're not going to take your aggressions out on us today. Probably not. Can you tell us about your work with the Center on Conscience and War? Well, the Center on Conscience and War was founded in 1940, actually today, is at 65th anniversary of existence. We were founded to protect the rights of conscience and subjectories to war. We have been doing that ever since. We continue to do that both by dealing with conscientious objectors in times of drafts and by dealing with conscientious objectors who find themselves as conscientious objectors while members of the military. We've supported people who are conscientious objectors against paying military taxes. We participate in lobbying against wars and lobbying for the rights of conscientious objection and any kind of draft. We also participate as part of the GR Wright Hotline, which is an 800 number that can be reached anywhere in the United States. And you can ask questions about the rights of people vis-a-vis the military. We also help people with counter recruitment trying to keep the military out of our schools to the best of our ability and make sure that when people make the choice to join the military, they know what they're doing. We also are considered the world's authority on conscientious objection and have given legal opinions, expert witness opinions for Canada, England, Israel, Russia, Turkey. And we also support conscientious objectors who are trying to become citizens in the United States and are not willing to swear that they will take up arms to this in the country. So that's about what we do. How many people is the central incontinence more? Well, at the moment I have three full-time employees, including myself, and then I have a full-time volunteer from the resident volunteer service, and I have two once a week law clerks. I also have a part-time person who does not work in the centre but helps coordinate meetings for us. The centre was originally set up as a religious sport. Well, we still try to assure that it's in our religious. When we were originally found that we were linked with only religious conscientious objectors, we now represent all conscientious objectors. But our board has got people on it from a spectrum of faith communities. We have two Jewish members. We had a Muslim member who just had to resign recently because his job became much too taxing on him to continue on the board. We have a Buddhist member. We have a Catholic member, a Menonite, a brethren, a Quaker, Presbyterian, Piscopalian, and Anna Lutheran. She's new. I'd forgotten about her. It's sort of a motley group of people from different faith communities. But we do come together as a kind of faith community together to do this kind of work. You said that originally it was religious, and now you help people who have no religious affiliation or belief particularly. What is the criteria? Are there multiple or is it just a single one? That's to whom we help. I pretty much help whomever calls the office and ask for help. There are two large groups. One is conscientious objectors. And conscientious objection is not just a religious right. It's a moral ethical or religious right. But we also help anybody who calls the GI right hotline. And sometimes it's about conscientious objection, and sometimes it's about hardship, and sometimes it's about the recruiter lied. And sometimes it's about medical problems, so it varies. And we don't pre-select. We answer whatever questions we're asked to the best of our abilities. I noticed in that list that you included that the recruiter lied is one of the criteria. Does that happen very often? I was telling a recruiter lies. It's when he opens his mouth. They probably are honest recruiters out there. In fact, I've talked to one or two. But really being a military recruiter is just being a self-person. And probably the most aggressive of self-people. And there's a lot of incentive for them to get their quotas. They have a very low quota most people think when they hear it, which is each recruiter is supposed to get two new recruits per month. But the reality is that they're actually very difficult, that they have to make thousands of contacts with youth to get those two each month. If they don't make that quota, they get a black mark. And the way it works in the military is if you get black mark, you get passed over for promotion. And if you're passed over one twice, your career is ended. So there's a lot of incentive for the recruiters to do their job. And it's getting increasingly difficult and not that an entirely new phenomena that recruiters are telling people lies. But it certainly has gone to new heights or our depth depending on how you look at it. Before September 11, 2001, I got my hands on a letter from a recruiter to a mother saying, "Don't worry. Today's military is not about war." And perhaps that was true at that point. But even as recently as two weeks ago, I talked to a young person who said the recruiter said, "If I got this MOS, I wouldn't be deployed to Iraq." And I said, "Okay, so what's your MOS?" And he said, "MP." And I said, "Oh, baby, that's who they're deploying to Iraq." So, you know, our experiences, and to be fair, we tend to get the people who are unhappy calling the GI rights hotline. But I've also talked to a lot of people who are perfectly content in the military who would admit they just smile when I say, "My joke about health, can you tell when a recruiter lies?" I actually just said it yesterday to a recruiter who was calling up here asking for help. And he didn't prove to me or say, "Oh, no, recruiters don't lie," or even, "Oh, no, I don't lie." He just acknowledged my remark, and I helped him out with what he needed. I can bread back, I think, maybe in May that they were pulling in the recruiter, stopping recruiting for a couple of weeks to do retraining. Did you hear about that, too? It wasn't anything so elegant. What happened was that there was this high school boy who was an honor student. He wired himself up with a camera, a mini camera, and a microphone, and he went into the recruiter and said, "I've dropped out of school, and I smoked dope, and I want to join the army." And the recruiter said, "Don't worry, here will help forge this high school diploma for you, and let's go over to the store and we'll buy this dragon." It'll clear the marijuana out of your system, so you'll pass the P-test. And then he took the video, and he showed it locally, and then it got on to CBS News, and of course, the army was all, "Oh, my goodness, how terrible. We didn't know recruiters were doing this." And what they had was a one-day stand-down, where the recruiters were not supposed to recruit, and they were instead, they got this satellite feed. This is as near as we can determine, you're not supposed to lie, you're not supposed to threaten. And this was a reading of the regulations more than anything. Because the regulations, if they followed the regulations, it wouldn't be so bad, but of course they don't. The irony is, the real kicker on the story is that I had witnesses in two different places in the country that during the lunch break saw the army recruiters picking up their lunch, and while they were at the fast food joint, trying to recruit the employee there. So they weren't even able to stand down the whole day. How widespread are these abuses? You're joking, and I admit that it's a joke as opposed to a blanket condemnation. How widespread are these abuses? I would say is that by sheer numbers, there have to be honest recruiters. The abuses are widespread. No abuses are widespread. I mean, to a certain extent, the nature of the beast. You know, my son actually got a job as a salesperson, and he's been talking to me about all the techniques. And in fact, I bought that photocopy machine from him and we got it home, and I said, "Oh, you know, it's really too tall for this space." And he goes, "Bires or more, yes, I know all about it." I mean, it's salesmanship, and while salesmanship in and of itself is not a lie, there's an element of that kind of spin. Don't tell the whole story tells the parts that you want them to hear, that even the most unscrupulous and honest of sales people will do. And then they're all the rest, and that's a problem. And, you know, every day I get a phone call from somebody saying, "Well, the recruiter told me not to mention my asthma." Well, the recruiter told me to lie about smoking dope, and we get way too many phone calls from people saying exactly the same thing for this to be just a completely made up situation. And we occasionally have been able to prove it with witnesses from other people, but, you know, a good self-person is just as good about not making promises that they can't keep in front of witnesses as a good recruiter is. And then the recruiter is going to edge because when you sign those contracts, they can write down any number of wonderful things on those contracts, but the small print, which is really, really small, which at, you know, 18 and 19, you're even less likely to read than if you're doing it. Since, basically, it doesn't matter what the recruiter has said to you, and it doesn't matter what this contract says, we can change it at any time at our will. And so they don't even have to completely lie. They can promise you a job, and they can, more or less, honestly, knowing that it's really not within their control. They're not the general. They can the decision. They're not the commandant or commanding officer or a colonel or anything else making the decision. All they are is a person who's getting you to sign a contract. So it doesn't matter what they say to you in a certain sense. In the story that you mentioned about your son, you mentioned his comment about buyer's remorse. You certainly must run into buyer's remorse on the part of these recruits. Well, there's an element of that, too. I mean, there are some young people who feel like they know what they're getting into, and they know that the recruiter can't promise this or that, but they know that they really, they believe they really want to get involved. And the military, they think it would be good for them to discipline and that they feel the same one that they would be willing to kill people for their country. And then they get in, they realize this is so much more, and that killing people is so much harder than they thought. Or just that they find that they don't want to be told when to wake up, go to sleep, pee, stand, sit, go to work. They don't want to work 60, 70, 80 hour work weeks. They don't want to be yelled at, they don't want to have the things going on around their lives, so they're going on around their lives. There is always going to be a certain number of people who are going to have buyers remorse, even if they hadn't been misled. So, yeah, we hear that, too. It's just not for me. It's the phrase that you're mostly. About how many calls do you get a month that they hotline? The hotline gets between two and four thousand calls a month, depending on what's going on. And how many cases or anything do you take on? Do you counsel each of those folks? Or about how many counsels do you get? Well, my office gets 11% of whatever the hotline gets. And at that point, we give them a different 800 number call, and we also get calls on our own directly. In one month, there were 2,000 calls. That would mean we would have gotten 220 hotline calls. We've probably gotten another 220 other calls from other sources, from people talking about threat issues, and people who have gotten our phone number directly from a friend. So, we normally range between four to 800 calls a month. And, yes, those are all counselies. Some of them, you know, a lot of them are one phone call. The easiest phone call, and the one that I always let my new staff members do, is the delayed entry program. I love the delayed entry program in the sense that if you give the person advice on how to get out of it at the 100% success rate, there aren't any possible glitches. The bottom line with that is to treat the recruiter like the stranger with candy. Your mother always used to tell you about. And don't talk to him. Don't answer his phone calls. Don't let him in the door. And by all means, don't get into the car with him. If you find up under the delayed entry program, the way you get out of it is you don't report. And so, that's it. And the hardest part of the delayed entry phone call is to convince the person on the other end of the line that that's all they have to do and that know they won't go to jail and know their credit won't be run and know they won't be barred from college or any other nonsense. And it's totally successful if they take your advice. The problem comes in is that sometimes the recruiter will come and say, "Oh, okay, we'll cave. Come on down with me. Do the recruiting station, and we'll find the papers and you'll get out." And the kid will get in the car with him. He'll drive him 500 miles from their home, put him up in a hotel. Say, "You're on the bus tomorrow." Or come with a police officer friend standing in his shadow. Not doing anything, just standing there, just looking, intimidating, just giving the impression that they can arrest the kid. Or the recruiter will convince the parent that they can arrest the kid and the parent that doesn't want the kid to ruin his own life. Or they'll convince the preacher or the teacher or the counselor, most of whom don't know the rules either. And if you can convince the players in the situation that all they have to do is not report and that it will eventually go away, then it's 100% successful. And so I like giving those calls to my young interns. What percentage of your calls are dealing with people who are in the military or in the process there and who want to get out? I would say 99.9999 presents almost all of them are about people who want to get out. I occasionally get a call from somebody who wants to stay in. I occasionally get a call who wants to know, do they have a right to see a jag? Or what benefits are they going to get? But those are pretty occasional. So almost all your calls come from people who are in the military wanting to get out. Do you get any calls from people who are trying to prepare for the draft and establish their conscientious objector status? Yes, we do get calls. But more often than not, I find that most of those calls come from people's parents and grandparents. But on the other hand, we often get calls with people asking us to come out to wherever they are located and to speak publicly so that young people can come and hear how to set up their files and to train draft counselors so that they can be trained to help the young people in their locales. I only have a feeling that we should repeat a couple times during the course of this interview. The GI rights hotline phone number. Could you say it, please? 1-800-394-9544. What's your specific job function within the organization? Well, I'm the executive director. I go around and tell everybody I'm boss lady. I have several functions. Part of it's programmatic. I go out and do trainings. I do speeches. I am part of the lobbying effort. I help write some of the literature. But a lot of it is true with any executive director who is also administrative and fundraising. So I'm the person who oversees our finances, does the hiring, inspiring, and does the fundraising. How long have you been in this position? I was hired September of 1999 in an interim basis and finally at some point I forget when I became the permanent executive director. What led you to this kind of work? I think originally you were some kind of a tax lawyer, right? And you'll say about lawyers how you can tell when they're lying. And now, how's that? When they open their mouth, I don't think so. Most lawyers I know tell the truth, actually. I get kind of comfy about the suggestion that lawyers are honest because actually most lawyers are scrupulously honest in that sometimes irritating to other people. But yeah, ultimately we're hired and done too. I was a very odd kind of tax lawyer. When I went to law school, I kind of assumed I kind of thought I'd deal labor law, environmental law. And I thought, well, you know, there are a lot of liberal labor lawyers and liberal environmental lawyers. And you know, there really aren't that many liberal tax lawyers. So I thought, well, I have to find some way to deal with that. I set up a tax practice where I was primarily representing low income people, doing domesticers and bus boys and construction workers tax returns. And I did a lot of undocumented workers tax returns. And I started helping small nonprofits establish. And that became my practice. But on top of all that, I am representing demonstrators here in Washington, D.C. And representing more tax resistors, people who feel compelled to not pay for what they cannot do themselves, so they're not willing to pay for war if they're not willing to participate in war. When there was still something to litigate, I was litigating that. There isn't anything to litigate anymore except at the corporate level. And I'm sitting and waiting to see what the IRS is going to do. What do you mean there's nothing left to litigate? All the arguments that have been proposed, you know, the first amendment, the 14th amendment, the Oregon versus Smith case, all the legitimate arguments have been argued and lost. Even though I don't think the Smith case is a lost on the tax issue, I'm not willing to bring a case that I don't think is winnable. In New York City in 1982, when a million people took to the streets, I'll bet some of you are there. We learned that Secretary of State Alexander Heg was asked to comment on this march, and his comment was, "Let them march all they want, just as long as they continue to pay their taxes." So in that spirit, we offer... The IRS says, "pay your dues, business doesn't, why should you, don't pay taxes?" Enron skipped a year or two, show the tax man your no fool at all, pay taxes. You can end this yearly aggravation, just pretend that you're a corporation. And tell 'em that you're working hard, drilling oil wells in your yard, don't pay your taxes. A package you don't want or need, arrives this April COD, don't pay taxes. A few demented terrorists have got you on their mailing list, don't pay taxes. Please report these sleazy overspenders, mark your tax return, return to center. Call John Ashcroft or any Fed, it's obscene, unsolicited, don't pay your tax. The dollars that you pay for won't kill people in El Salvador, don't pay taxes. If some escaped to this fair, let your dollars send them back again, don't pay taxes. The generals say they want you where they got you. They got you buyin' black hot helicopters, you work for peace, you pay for it. If you hate war, don't pay for it, don't pay your tax. Yeah, tell me I RS this year, let 'em know the box stops here and don't pay your taxes. You are listening to an interview with J. E. McNeil of the Center on Conscience and War in Washington, D.C. A group that helps provide counseling for those in the military and for those seeking to establish themselves as conscientious objectors. What got you into this line of work? Why did you start defending protesters and destroyers and conscience objectors? Well, I don't know. It seemed like an idea at the time. That's a reasonable question, I don't know what the answer is. I always was a great strong believer in the first amendment right to free speech. I'm enough of a believer in it that I'm willing to listen to things that I don't like, as well as represent people that are protesting on the side of things that I do like. I am sufficiently unpopular because when I represent demonstrators and right before, they want me to push the envelope, such as the cases I had to make it legal to demonstrate in the capital, Rotunda. I pointed out to them that that meant that people who had a position that they didn't like demonstrate there, too, and they were all offended that I should suggest that. But people saying ugly things is just as important as people saying beautiful things in order to have a nation and a court that works. That didn't answer your question, but there you go. Well, I understand that party motivation is just supportive people's rights. It seems to me that there must be some ideological, spiritual beliefs behind it. Well, most of this work that I've done I haven't been paid for. I've been paid for a little for. I think the Constitution is so important, and I'm such a fan of democracy. People don't talk about that much. They talk about it almost like it's a bad thing anymore. Democracy, voting, I believe that when the country goes into excesses, that the system will deal with those excesses through the courts, through Congress, through one system or another. If one system, you know, if the courts go nuts, then Congress deals with it, and if Congress go nuts, then the courts deal with it, and the President jumps in there from time to time. I'm very fond of our country. But, you know, behind all of that, part of why I do the hotline work the way I do is because of my belief as a Quaker. It keeps me prepped up sometimes when I'm not feeling like I'm doing much, except standing around talking. What were you raised? I was raised up as a Methodist in the south, and it no longer was a good fit. I started not being a good fit when I was a teenager, and I started rejecting the Nicene Creed, which I had to talk about other things that I had trouble with the concept. And I started dropping the words out of the Nicene Creed, then I realized that it didn't matter if I dropped the words out or not, because it was just connecting, historically, with other people who had a strong faith. And so I was willing to say the whole Nicene Creed. But then in about the mid-60s, I began rejecting involvement in Vietnam, and my local church did not. And I couldn't live with the church supporting that war, and eventually dropped my membership. I felt like the church didn't speak to me at that time. So I quit right after the minister as the church died, who I had been close friends with, and he kind of kept me staying with the church. But then I quit the church, and didn't really have any faith community until I moved up to Washington, D.C. I was on a bus going to New Job, and the bus went right by the friend's meeting house. I thought, "Yeah, I should drop in there some Sunday." So I did. I went one Sunday morning at 10 o'clock, turned out the meeting was at 11. I sat in the meeting room from 10 until people started showing up, and I sat through meeting for worship for an hour. And I was just completely blown away by it. The most common phrase you'll hear in people's application for membership among friends is, "I felt like I came home." And that was the feeling. I felt like I'd found what I'd been looking for for years, just didn't know it. Can you put into words at all what you experienced in that hour or two? I experienced a connectedness with God in a more primal manner than I had under any other circumstance. It was a much more clear connection with God than I'd had in years. And it was uncluttered by hymns and prayers and Bible readings and sermons. And although I do still somewhat miss the hymns, all the rest I'm glad to let go. Was it something somebody said? At the meeting that time, I have no clue if anybody ever said anything. I don't remember. I don't think so. So it was completely silent, meeting out of which you had this experience? Well, a lot of friends meeting of Washington, it's unlikely it was completely silent meeting. I don't have to rave any there. And at that time, there was only one meeting, and it was a good 200 people, 150 to 200 people in the room. So the odds of it being a totally silent meeting, I think, are fairly low. My memory of that meeting is not of what anybody said. It was of the feeling. And to me, that's a lot of what meeting for worship is about. People speak in meetings, and sometimes I speak in meetings for worship. But that's not ultimately what meeting for worship is about. It's about the connection with God. Can you say anything about God from what you learned in your Methodist upbringing, from what you learned in your family to your non-practicing era? What do you think of God? What do you think of God? When I first started as a teenager, rejecting virgin birth, and I didn't quite reject Jesus as God, I increasingly felt that the tradition that I was being raised in, which was a fairly strict and minimalist belief in Jesus as God, and wasn't from the dead on the third day, and sent it into heaven, sitting at the right hand of God. And I see, and the creed is coming back to my lips. It was a very strict notion of God and Jesus, and of a sort of judgmental God, and one that had lots of rules, and set around smiting bad people, lifting up good people. And increasingly, I began to realize that something my mother had always said, but not in relationship to God at all, was the concept of the difference between truth and fact, that ultimately I came to believe that the Bible was true, but not necessarily completely factual, that just as I explained to my son, as he got older, you know, that age-old thing about what do you tell your kid when they ask you, is Santa Claus real, lie to him and say, "Oh, yeah, Santa Claus lives up in the North Pole," and goes, "Oh, ho, ho," or do you say, "No, no." I chose a middle ground that is based on the same way that I do a lot that I do in my life, which is, I said, "Well, there's a difference between truth and fact." And is it true that Santa Claus exists, but it's not a factual thing. And Santa Claus, like God and a lot of other things, are aspect of the love from God and unchanging. And it's the facts that we hang on that truth that caught it right up. So the time period between why rejecting the Methodist tradition of communion and hymns and responsive ratings, and the, I guess, about eight years or more that I didn't go to any church at all, then when I came to friends' meeting, and one of the tenets of Quakerism is that you strip away the outside sacraments of communion and baptism, and you leave the inside sacraments, the ones that are true. And we, as friends, are not 100% successful in it, because, of course, ultimately, we're human. If we attempt to do this, to strip away all the human-factual clutter that interferes with our ability to see the truth that is God. How does your family feel about your position as it stands now? How does my family feel about me being a Quaker? They're happy I'm a Quaker. My sister is an Episcopalian, my other sister is a Methodist. I don't know what my other sister is. I think she may be a Baptist these days. I've got a nephew who's a fundamentalist Baptist. Is your family a household around which people will talk about their spiritual and their religious and their political beliefs? For all, very similar political beliefs, I'm probably the most radical in my age range. I have a nephew and a niece who are more radical than I. But we talk about the spiritual sum. We don't talk about it all the time. It's not a common conversation. But we've had that conversation. We certainly talk about the churches we go to. It comes up, for instance, when we have my sister and I have a friend. We had a really close friend who died, and we went to his memorial meeting. So it came up as a conversation then. And then when my husband died, it came up as a conversation at that time as well. Are you saying that the Christian fundamentalist of your family are fairly accepting of your views about war? Well, yeah, actually, everybody in my family is accepting about my views about war. I think my sister and my mother, well, my sister believes that war is occasionally necessary. My mother is a little bit more forgiving and believes of it as a necessary evil. My sister sees it as probably always morally wrong, but sometimes a practical matter, a good thing. Whereas I think it doesn't work, it's wrong. There's never an excuse for it, and it's never the right answer. Has this been your opinion long term? No, it really hasn't been my opinion long term. That's one of the things I always point out to people when I'm training them about conscientious objection, is that very few of us, 16 years old, go, "Oh, I think all wars are wrong and they don't work." We've got a lot of historical position that, you know, wars are not a good thing and they never make people happy, but sometimes you need to do them. I mean, that's the common wisdom in the United States, and probably in the world that wars are ugly and bad, but that sometimes they just can't be avoided. They have to happen if you're going to protect what you think is important. And so most kids, at best, get a mixed message, the one from school and the one from home. And I didn't get a mixed message. I mean, the message I got growing up was based off of World War II, a just war, where we were stopping a horrible evil Hitler and the horrible things he and the Nazis were doing, and it's hard to argue that they weren't doing horrible things because they clearly were. And so the time period in which I was raised, the whole notion of standing up against the common enemy was still very strong in the country's culture. It was only reinforced when we switched our enemy from the Nazis who we had finally destroyed to the Communists, and it was quite pervasive at that time. I also grew up in a fairly poor neighborhood, a neighborhood where my high school graduating class of 650, I think, about 50 of us went to college, and it's that kind of a neighborhood. So it was during Vietnam, and that meant if you were a boy and you didn't go to college, that you were probably going to get drafted, and a lot of them did. And I was the youngest of five kids and thought that I would probably become a Marine to get money to go to college. And junior high in the ninth grade, I had a history teacher. And she had the class all due as part of their history assignments to do a debate. I got assigned as the debate topic for me resolved that we should pull out of the war in Vietnam, and I was debating a guy named Chris Lott. He says, "Well, I have to have the right side of this argument because his brother was a Marine who was in Vietnam, and we both knew that he was going to argue that we should be in Vietnam with our duty." And I was supposed to have the wrong side. And I can still remember to this very day the sort of tact memory of almost sitting down, not quite having my bottom hit the seat of the chair I was sitting in, and realizing that I thought that we had no business doing what we were doing. And the whole class voted as to who won the debate, and it was unanimous that Chris won the debate, except the teacher voted for me, and she gave me the only AI I ever received in junior high. And so that was in 1964. Early on, before people opposed the war, and certainly in Texas, there were some people opposing it in the northeast, but not anybody I knew, except for my immediate family. We opposed the war, I went to college, spent a lot of time protesting the war in Vietnam, and shaking my head at various assassinations as they went all frustrated and angry and feeling exonerated in my belief. It was one of the found friends that I got to the belief that wars were immoral in all cases, and I became increasingly a pacifist. In Kosovo, the last brickville into place for me, which really is it long ago, '98, '99, right in there. And what happened was, and it's just sort of a dark coincidence, there had been this children's book that I read as a little girl called Betsy Tacey, and Betsy Tacey and Ted. And it's one of the coming of age books, and it was set near St. Louis in the series. And the second to last book was Betsy going on the Grand Tour of Europe, and the last book was when she was buried and had her baby during World War I. But when she was on the Grand Tour of Europe, which was the book I was reading at first when we were in Kosovo, it describes her traveling primarily around the Eastern Europe. And ultimately she ends up in England, and she's in London on the night. England declared war against the Kaiser Wilhelm, moving and chilling description of the bells, the sound of people singing "God Save the King" starting near Parliament and going out in waves after waves across London. But I would be reading about these hatreds and feuds between different people in the book, and then I would be looking at the front page of the Washington Post, and it would be hard to tell which was which. The same pipes that were going on in the early 1900s were still going on, and we'd had two ors since then that were supposed to deal with those. And so that was when the final brick fell into place. It's what a useless tool war is, that it may solve the problem in the sense that it may stop a really nasty guy, but then so would police action, done properly. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't solve the underlying hatred, the anti-Semiticism, the anti-whatever, the anti-Muslim, the anti-Irish Catholics, and the anti-Irish Protestants, and all the anger. The war doesn't solve those problems. And so that was really the final brick for me when I understood that not only was war morally wrong, but it doesn't even work. It's pointless. It's a pointless exercise. It's death for thousands for no reason. But having said that, then everybody always says to me, well, then what's the solution? They could say, you don't have war, and people will run right over you. And the answer is that the problem is the way we deal with war and deal with problems in the world. And we as a nation, and this may be egotistic and paternalistic of me, perhaps it's not just we as a nation, but the United Nations and all the rich and powerful nations that make up a lot of the United Nations. Often deal with problems in the world the way a bad parent deals with raising a child. You know, the parents that always let the kids do whatever they want to. Oh, gotta give them freedom. And then when the kids, like 13 or 14 and 15, they send them to, you know, tough love camps. Oh, he's just out of control. I don't know what else to do. Often the reason they get to that point is because nobody said no to them. Nobody's curbed the bad acts when it was still real easy and possible to curb the bad acts. And when you look at wars, I mean, that's often the case. I mean, there were many opportunities for us to curb the bad acts of the Taliban. There were many opportunities for us to curb the bad acts of Saddam Hussein. In fact, the whole registration for the draft was to send a message that we supported our friends in Afghanistan, including the Taliban against the evil Soviet Union. And consider yourself a CO or a pacifist or both? I consider myself a CO and probably not a pacifist. I'm not above flooding my son upside the head. I'm not a pacifist, but I'm fairly close. And what is the difference for you between a pacifist and a CO? Well, the difference for me is the legal difference. The conscientious objector is somebody who conscientiously opposes their own participation in war in any form based on this is their moral ethical or religious belief. One of the most well-known conscientious objectors from the Vietnam era was Muhammad Ali. He beat people up for a living. No one would accuse Muhammad Ali of being a pacifist. It's not about non-violence. I mean, there are lots of conscientious objectors who hunt, who are police officers, who use deadly force in their job as a police officer. It's really not about non-violence. It's about war. And that's a significant difference. War in any form. Does that mean you have to be able to say, I think, that World War II was horrible? Well, no. You don't have to figure out what you would have done 60 years ago. So if you believe that you would fight in Armageddon, the ultimate war of good against evil, that doesn't interfere with it. Or if you believe that you don't know what you would have done during World War II, you might have fought, that's okay. All you have to do is be able to fight. I can't fight in any wars that exist today. The problem is, of course, that if you thought it was okay to go bombing people in Afghanistan, but not okay to bomb people in Iraq, which is a very common position in the United States, that does not meet the legal criteria at this time. And what about if you are willing to protect your grandmother? Protecting your grandmother is not about war. It's about protecting your family. You can say the same about protecting your home property. It's not about deadly violence. It's not about violence. It's about war. The military action of one nation against another nation. Or one nation against a wannabe nation. So how does someone document or prepare to document themselves as a conscience subjector? We're talking about a young person, especially a young male. We would recommend that when he registers for the draft that he writes on his draft registration card, I am a conscience objector to war and that he photocopies it and takes the photocopy and files it to himself. And that creates a first documentation. But none of that shows the underlying question, which is are you a conscience objector? It just shows you tried. So the other thing you need to do is to write what do I believe about war? How did I come by my beliefs? And what in my life reflects those beliefs? Those are the questions that you would have to answer if there is a draft. We have a forum on our web page at www.centeronconscience.org called Basic Information on Registration in the Draft that outlines all of this and gives the three questions with some suggestions on how to answer them. You might want to download those and look at them and think about them. You want letters about you. You want a teacher or a friend or a neighbor who can really tell a real story about you. And the best possible letter would be from the Lieutenant Colonel who lives next door who says you're an idiot, but a sincere idiot. That's a really good letter. The other thing to think about is to remember who your audience is. It's probably people who are fairly pro military. You want to make sure that what you say in the form of eye statements and not about what other people are and do and think what you believe because that's really the criteria. It doesn't matter whether or not the people in the military are wrong. It's whether or not you would be wrong to be doing what they're doing. And it doesn't matter what Martin Luther King or Gandhi have to say about war. It matters what you have to say about war. So those are important things to think about. The other things you might want to put in your file are, you know, clippings of you holding an anti-war sign or the history report you wrote in the 11th grade on conscientious objection in the United States. Things that tend to support the position that you are a conscientious objector. I'm sure that our listeners are going to end up having a lot more questions about this or need to have things clarified. You said that they could do it via your website www.centerandconscience.org and what was the phone number for the GI rights hotline? For military questions, they can call the GI rights hotline. It's 1-800-394-9544. If they have questions about the draft, I recommend that they call the Center on Conscience and More and that number is 202-483-2220. Jay, how likely is it that there is going to be a draft? Is this something that young folks really need to be worrying about? Well, I think young folks should worry about this regardless, and I think old folks should regardless. When we get complacent and think that we don't have to worry about war, that war comes to our country, we need to be paying attention to this issue and be clear in our hearts about what we believe about this issue in order to forestall it from coming. Having said that, I will say that I think that we are as close to having a draft as we have been in the last 20 years, and it would take very little for us to end up having a draft. The reality is that the Marines and the Army haven't made their quota since January. The National Guard and the Reserves haven't made their quota since 18 months ago in recruiting new members that all of the branches rely on a constant turnover in military personnel, and although they've found various ways to kind of shore up the numbers over the last two years by using the individual ready reserve, which are people who haven't been called up since the Korean War, and by using mercenaries, and by now starting to have Navy and Air Force MPs go to Iraq. The fact is that there are only so many people in the military, and if they continue to keep this large of a presence in Iraq, there is going to be a problem with numbers because a lot of these people are needed back home. This was perfectly clear with Katrina. It was clear in California with the wildfires. It may well be increasingly clear if we have a harsh winter. So it really would take very little to be in a position where the President and Congress can say, "Look, we didn't want a draft and everything we could not have a draft, but we really have no choice at this point." And I think most people would be unhappy, but would tell, "What can you do? What other choice do we have?" And we would then end up with another draft. So yes, it would be very wise to be prepared. That's how we feel about preparing for the potential of a draft. We don't want to wait last minute, and we're close enough that it's wise to prepare. Any memorable cases? Well, one of my memorable cases was a young woman who had been trained to be an interrogator. She was trained in Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese, and she was sent to Japan to be an interrogator and visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And when she walked away from those sites, she went back to her barracks and sat down and looked up, took her attention to subjection, and began writing a CO application. Her commanding officer tried to bring her up on charges, but the charges essentially were the two things so polite that she had to be being sarcastic. And they were bringing her up on charges because that way they could have discharged her without giving her her fully honorable conscientious objector discharge. But she successfully beat that rap and ultimately did get her conscious subjector discharge. That one was successful. Unless successful, the story was the young man who joined the Marines because he wanted it to be a firefighter. He was from Brooklyn, an African-American from Brooklyn, and so of course they made him infantry. And he was in Iraq. He was awarded winning marks and a good Marine. And he was in Iraq and he realized that one night when he was firing his weapon on his commanding officer's command, that he was praying that he was missing people and saying, "Dear Lord Jesus, don't let me kill anyone." And after he was shipping back from Iraq, he went to the chaplain and explained his feelings and his concerns. And the chaplain said, "We'll go to church more, son, you'll feel better." And so he started going to church more and as he went to church more, he realized that he could no longer kill people and participate more and that that was not what God wanted in his life. And he filed a CO application and it was lost and he filed it again and it was lost again and it was lost again. Finally, they were sending in mortars to shipping back to Iraq. So they miraculously found a CO application and processed it real fast and denied it so that they could force him to carry a weapon when he was in Iraq. And so he did not go. He went UA. What does UA mean? Unauthorized absence, it's the same thing as AWOL or AWOL, which is absent without leave. It's basically not being where you're supposed to be in the military. And in his case where he was supposed to be was on a plane to go ship to Iraq and he didn't do it. He ended up serving jail time, which he thought was much the better choice than killing people again. That's a pretty powerful statement. God married in a hurry and we had us a son. Back in 1973, I was drafted at the end of the Vietnam War. Though I never did go overseas, but I remember the look on the ones who came back. Their faces still haunt me so, and I made myself a promise I would do what it takes. So Jimmy didn't have to go, 'cause if Jimmy didn't have to go, there's nothing I would do. That boy means the world to me, and he ought to be the world to you. I know why we throw lives away and come home with nothing to show. I only know I would sell my soul if Jimmy didn't have to go. I went from the army to the army reserves, there's nothing that moves I can't fix. I didn't think much about it just a weekend warrior, then I turned 36, and they called me in, and they shipped me out. I'm thinking now I could have said no, but a whisper to Cathy we would finish it early. So Jimmy didn't have to go, 'cause if Jimmy didn't have to go, there's nothing I wouldn't do. That boy means the world to me, he ought to be the world to you. I know why we throw lives away and come home with nothing to show. I only know I would sell my soul if Jimmy didn't have to go. They said it wouldn't come to hand to hand, though the borders just a mile away. Well the enemy surprised us from behind, they were running back the other way. Guess they were looking for a place to hide, guess they were looking for a face they'd known. Wondering what the hell they were doing there, and why they ever had to go, but if Jimmy didn't have to go, there's nothing I wouldn't do. That boy means the world to me, he ought to be the world to you. I don't know why we throw lives away and come home with nothing to show. I only know I would sell my soul if Jimmy didn't have to go. I killed a soldier with a silent knife, I pulled him down on top of me. I looked into the eyes looking back into mine, he couldn't have been seventeen. I held him as he died so quiet, I held him as he died so slow, I held him until I knew it wasn't enough that Jimmy didn't have to go. They sent me up for court marshal 'cause I wouldn't do a thing I was told. Their lawyer said I was a coward, mine said I was just too old, but it wasn't the fear of the bombs above or the fear of the gas below. I'm afraid to meet the eyes of the Iraqi father, who's Jimmy, had to go. 'Cause if Jimmy didn't have to go, God, there's nothing I wouldn't do. That boy means the world to me now, he ought to be the world to you. I don't know why we throw lives away and come home with nothing to show. I only know there's a time to say no, and Jimmy didn't have to go. Jay, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today and for your work with both the people in the military who are trying to find right livelihood and for the young people that you're counseling. Thank you for having me. You've been listening to a new interview with Jay E. McNeil of the Center on Conscience and War. They're one of a number of organizations who help staff what's called the G.I. Rights Hotline. You can learn about the G.I. Rights Hotline via their website at www.G.I.R.I.G.H.T.S. dot O.R.G. And you can call them at 800-394-9544. You can contact the Center on Conscience at War via their website www.centeronconscience.org or you can call them at 202-483-2220. The music in today's program included two songs by Charlie King and Karen Brandau. The first was "Don't Pay Taxes" and the second was "If Jimmy Didn't Have to Go". You can find more information on this program and other programs of Spirit in Action via our website at www.NorthernSpiritRadio.org. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands But Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this. To love and serve your neighbor, enjoy selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor, enjoy selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor, enjoy selflessness. [Music]