Resistance to Military Service

Report Outline
Resistance to Draft for Viet Nam War
Expansion of the Resistance Movement
Issues in Resistance to Military Service
Special Focus

Resistance to Draft for Viet Nam War

Resistance to military service in the Viet Nam war is losing its sporadic character and beginning to stabilize as a national movement with an abundance of muscle and growing power. The agencies of government, which once bore patiently with the few eccentrics who burned their draft cards, are starting to tighten the screws. The change of attitude has been made apparent in a number of ways: Police putting down anti-war demonstrations on college campuses; draft boards withdrawing deferments from student anti-war activists; judges handing out harsher sentences to draft law violators; and, finally, the indictment on Jan. 5, 1968, of Dr. Benjamin M. Spock, the anti-war crusading pediatrician, Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr., Presbyterian chaplain of Yale University, and three others for “aiding and abetting” draft resistance—a charge which could net each of them a five-year jail sentence and a $10,000 fine. Their trial, possibly as early as this spring, will focus public attention as never before on the issues raised by resistance to military service.

Escalation of the counter-attack has only served to escalate the resistance. A new test of the strength of the movement will come on April 3, the third in a series of days designated for demonstrations against the draft wherever the resistance movement has taken root. An anti-draft showing of some kind is expected in nearly 100 different locations. There will be rallies, speeches, concerts, interfaith peace services, marches, teach-ins, workshops, draft counseling, and the inevitable all-night bull sessions of activist youth get-togethers. The biggest event of the day will be a mass turning back (and a few burnings) of draft cards.

The draft resistance movement asserts that 2,500 young men disposed of their draft cards in this fashion on two previous resistance demonstration days, Oct. 16 and Dec. 4, 1967. Planners of the coming demonstration are hoping that another 2,500 youths will do the same on April 3. The loss to military manpower may be miniscule, but leaders of the movement believe that “as few as 5,000 resisters nationally could effectively disrupt Selective Service altogether.”