Written by P.H. Fraser – I lived in Denmark as a war expatriate for about five years, from 1969 to 1974. When I flew out of JFK bound for Europe, I didn’t know exactly where I was going, and I had no intention to return. But a boy-man of twenty-two does not yet realize how much five years can change things. On the other hand, at twenty-two, five years still seems like a very long time. It was for this very-long-time I lived in Denmark. Then… things changed. I got homesick, and I came home. My legal status was still unresolved, and there was some concern about crossing the border into The States. Partially to minimize this perceived risk I took a ship (you could still do that!) which docked in Montreal, figuring that a sleepy Canadian border crossing would put me under the radar. I wasn’t really worried. I had been following the news on the home front, and what with Nixon on the ropes and the war winding down to its final debacle, my general impression was that the US government had bigger fish to fry.
When I arrived home, May 1974, no one accosted me or disparaged me in any way. Those who knew me and my situation… some who strongly disagreed with what I was up to when I left the country… all treated me as if the whole thing had never happened. On the few occasions I compared notes with guys who had survived Vietnam, they all expressed the opinion that the war was a disaster for the country… was a misguided undertaking… never should have been fought. I’m sure not all Vietnam vets agree with this, of course. But it was, and is, a very common perception.
Getting my feet back on the ground in the home country, the scene looked like this: Nixon was three months from resignation. The war was being dragged out, waiting for a “dignified” moment to officially call it quits. Flag decals had been peeled off most of the cars. The whole culture seemed tired… in a grim state of shock. I got the impression that pretty much everyone just wanted to forget the whole sorry episode.
More than that, I detected an unspoken social agreement wherever I happened to be. This agreement seemed palpable… “in the air”… during any social contact between people who came of age in the 1960s. The agreement was that if you did not know the person you were talking to, and you did not know where they were or what they did during The War, you just didn’t bring it up. You could never know what side of the great chasm anyone had been on, or what they had endured, or what they had witnessed or what their thoughts were. It was all just too raw and painful. No one wanted to start a fight or inject bad feeling into what could otherwise be a good time.
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When I was fourteen years old my father took me down to The Playhouse in New Canaan Connecticut to see Judgment at Nuremburg. The film is a dramatization of the post Holocaust war-crimes trials in Germany just after World War II. Fourteen is a very impressionable age. I remember the documentary film clips… the mounds of skeletal bodies being bulldozed into open pits. The premise of the film… indeed the premise of the trials… deeply absorbed into my young mind… was that “just following orders” doesn’t cut it. The individual bears ultimate responsibility. There can be no excuses. This was a formative moment for me.
A few short years later I was put to the test. My country was blowing it badly in Southeast Asia. Would I participate..? Or no..?
There was never in any doubt in my mind. If I bear responsibility, then the choice is mine. I would refuse to have anything to do with it. But this determination came with years of bleak anguish. What was I going to do..? I started out by putting the whole problem off for as long as possible. I settled into Occidental College, and a 2-S draft deferment. This didn’t work out though. I didn’t like going to college, and soon it was apparent that my only motivation for being there was to “defer” my confrontation with the military. This was a miserable time for me. I disliked faking it at school when academic pursuit was the last thing on my mind… and I was acutely aware that others were caught in the crunch while I had a bullshit deferment. Then… a big deal came down early in 1968. End-the-war candidate Gene McCarthy “almost won” the Democratic primary election in New Hampshire. This challenge from within was absolutely unheard of, and garnered front-cover articles in both Time and Newsweek magazines. A very big deal indeed, which also led eventually to LBJ throwing in the towel and not standing for re-election. My response was to drop out of school on the spot and go to work full time for the McCarthy campaign. I was drawn to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I headed up there from Los Angeles to get involved. Arriving in Berkeley I read a street poster, found a McCarthy-for-President meeting, approached the people who were leading the show, and announced… “I’m full time”. They said “ah ha!”, took me under their wing, showed me around, and within a week I was running the precinct operation in Oakland. Like pretty much everybody else involved, I had no idea what I was doing, but we were young, inspired and motivated. One way to settle the confrontation with society was to get this damned war over with… right now.
But it was not to be, of course. Bobby Kennedy won the California primary… Gene came in a close second. Then Bobby was shot and killed. I was up all night with my campaign cohorts watching it all unfold on the tube. It was a bleak time. But… in the days following, it began seeming to us McCarthy campaigners that since we came in second, and the first place guy was gone, that we should somehow get bumped up… or something. The “winner take all” American political system started really showing its ugly head. Worse… when the dust settled it turned out that California’s delegates were somehow awarded to Hubert Humphrey. I really can’t remember how my friends generally felt about this, but I was infuriated. Humphrey hadn’t even run in the election, for crying out loud! It was here that I lost all confidence in the political process, and began to see that a head-on collision with “the powers that be” was inevitable. So… the fight to end the foolish war was taken into the streets. I was among the American patriots gathered in Chicago for the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention “riots”. It’s widely understood now, I think, that it was the Chicago police under the direction of Richard Daley (and LBJ..?) who rioted. To this day, when I very-infrequently catch a TV clip of those blue helmets in the klieg-lights, I know immediately what I am seeing. I was right there on Michigan Avenue, under the NBC camera, which was set up on the Hilton Hotel marquee. I can tell you… a billy-club hard on a human skull sounds something like a baseball bat on a watermelon. Somehow I got out of the tangled mass of people being clubbed punched and kicked, and moved fast, like only a young body can, dodging clubs all the way… to the perimeter of Grant Park. I lost a shoe in the fray, and I took a glancing blow from a club off the hard bone behind my left ear. I was a lucky one. People all around me were beaten bloody. And those who were positioned such that they ran toward the hotel… these were the ones who got pushed through plate glass windows… cut to ribbons. Some were triaged in the McCarthy campaign headquarters on an upper floor of the hotel.
Well… so… our efforts to head disaster off-at-the-pass had come to naught. We wound up with Nixon. It was an angry time… and I was pissed. I quit school completely, and spent the fall of 1968 composing my presentation to The Draft Board. I was not a draft dodger. I was a military refuser. I never pretended to be anything other than what I was, and sometime early in 1969 I went toe-to-toe with the draft board at a meeting in Norwalk, CT. My primary argument was that given my attitudes regarding personal responsibility, I should be classified 4-F… “mentally, morally, or physically unfit for service”. Turns out though, that the gang who ran the Nuremburg trials didn’t really take the consequences of them very seriously. This 4-F angle picked up no traction at all. My second level argument was, well… OK… then I’m CO… a conscientious objector. What could be more clear..? But the Selective Service law predicated “conscientious objection” on the idea that an individual had “religious training and belief” leading directly to their objections. I had no religious training and/or belief, and would not pretend that I did. But I argued that since the First Amendment holds that The State shall not indulge in any establishment of religion, it was therefore unconstitutional to maintain that my personal beliefs were less worthy of consideration than any “organized” religion. My beliefs are my own, I told them, arrived at through due consideration of conscience, and I’m entitled to this personal “religion” under the supreme law of the land. They didn’t buy this line of reasoning, and soon afterwards they sent me a directive to report for the armed forces physical examination. This came as no surprise to me, of course. I refused to show up for the physical exam, seeing it as participation in the military ethic… and soon thereafter I was declared “delinquent”, and summarily classified 1-A. (Some of you may recall how the infamous General Hershey, boss of the Selective Service, had come up with this strategy as a scheme to punish draft card burners and their ilk. More on this later.)
The way I saw it, I had four options… go into the military, go to jail, go “underground”, or leave the country. The first option was out… I took seriously the whole Nuremburg thing about personal responsibility. Of the other three, none held much appeal. But finding a new home was something I had some experience with, and knew I could do. My mood was black as the long dark night, and I wanted “out” of North America.
Research revealed that much of Europe was legally dicey for American draft outlaws, but that Sweden and Denmark were friendly. Sweden of course had the top drawer reputation. They even welcomed military deserters from the Vietnam fiasco, which was a full blown thumb in the eye to Uncle Sam on the diplomatic plane. The Swedes were into it. But I wound up in Denmark… partly because of having read a book about Scandinavia that cast Denmark in a favorable light. Mostly though, it was the weather. I flew out of NYC in late October 1969, arrived in Denmark early November, and weather conditions were atrocious. Copenhagen was cold, clammy, wet, gray, dark, windy, with sleet and driving rain… uninviting in every way. On numerous occasions I rode city busses aimlessly for hours, just to stay warm and under cover. Reflecting on my situation and remembering my impressions from reading, I decided I’d be damned if I was going four hundred miles further north to Stockholm.
I stuck around in Denmark. My idea was for them to grant me “political asylum”. They smiled, saying “what’re ya talking about..? You come from the freest country there is..!” On my third try, a very nice gentleman led me down the hall to his office. He closed the door. He told me… “look, personally I know very well what you are talking about, and what your situation is. But the Danish Government is not willing to stick its neck out like that… to officially grant asylum. You’re welcome to stay here, though. Just… keep a low profile. Don’t go on about the politics of it all. Get a job, live a life, stay out of trouble, pay your taxes. You’ll be fine.” I thanked the man very much for his wisdom and insights, and proceeded to do exactly as he suggested. After a hard lonely first winter, I finally met “my people”… learned the language, and lived as an adopted Dane until mid 1974.
As mentioned… things changed… I got homesick and came home. Turns out my legal situation had, unbeknownst to me, already been resolved in my favor by decision of the Supreme Court. Remember General Hershey and his punitive “delinquent = 1-A” policy..? Well… sometime in 1972, I think it was, someone pushed a “draft-card-burner” case all the way through and up to the highest court in the land. I don’t remember the name of the case, or what the vote was. But the decision was for the plaintiff. Basically, the court ruled that classifying someone as 1-A because of a selective service infraction amounted to “punishment without due process of law”, which is forbidden under the Constitution. So… relevant cases were all made null-and-void… all with that single stroke of the gavel. Mine was one of those cases. (Not to disparage in any way Jimmy Carter’s good heart and wise intentions when he issued his blanket amnesty in 1981… but I have always been very pleased that my legal situation was disposed of as a Constitutional issue.)
So… I’m back. I have visited my friends in DK and they me on a regular basis through the years. They are my dearest people on the planet. They adopted me in my time of extreme need. My friends over there mention with an offhand wave when the subject occasionally comes up, “oh… we think of Peter as a Dane”. To this day this is the greatest social delight of my life.
I have been privileged and fortunate… and I am grateful. How lucky… to be born into a society that somewhere at its core retains a reluctant but real tolerance for its dissidents. I am a low profile sort of guy by nature… I prize my peace and quiet. So perhaps I am easy to ignore. Or maybe I somehow just fell through the cracks. Still, it is notable that though I was in the crosshairs of a deep cultural divide, no effort of any kind was made to give me a hard time. I escaped from JFK on the evening of the very day I was ordered to report for induction into the army. No attempt was made to stop me. During my time in Denmark I needed to renew my passport. This was an uncomfortable juncture because the US embassy is officially American territory, and technically I was subject to arrest when I went in there to deal with it. But no one made the slightest indication that anything was amiss. No questions asked… I dropped my old passport off and they sent me a new one. My eventual re-immersion in the flow of America was glitch free. No visits from the FBI, no questions from the IRS about where I had been all those years… no problems of any kind. Over most of the world I would have been harassed mercilessly, or shot dead, or worse. I am very aware of this, and I am pleased to be a part of our extraordinary social experiment.
I know we have a good thing going here. And I know it needs defending. Most often it needs defending from internal sabotage… (would the Bill of Rights pass Congress if submitted for a vote today..?). But it needs defending from outside forces too. A few days after 9/11 I went down to the Navy recruiter in Danbury CT and volunteered. They told me… “thanks, but you’re past the age of eligibility”. It can well be pointed out that this was something of an empty gesture on my part… because… obviously… I was too old to be of any interest to the Navy. Still… if they had taken me I would have gone. This was a legitimate fight, and I wanted to do my share. But… though my motivation was from-the-heart, I later realized just how naive my kneejerk reaction had been. Subsequent developments showed that I would have been expected to follow the directives of a foolish, ignorant, immature president, who was surrounded by foolish, ignorant and often nefarious advisors. I would inevitably have invoked what I see as my right to opt out. This time I would have been a deserter.
I’m just not military material. My attitude is the same now as it was when I walked out of the New Canaan Playhouse at the age of fourteen. I simply will not just do as I am told. But… we need military services… and military services cannot be run that way. I know this. It is something I have come to see with the wisdom of age. I have no solution for this dichotomy. It is one of the many intractable human conundrums.
Nonetheless… I will always maintain that it is my right and my obligation to make the final decisions about what I do.
Mr. Fraser writes when the spirit moves him, and has done so forever. He currently resides in Black Mountain, NC.