If you're a conscientious objectior, it's probably a good idea to get that straight before you wind up in the war. I didn't.

My father had not one, but two aircraft carriers sunk out from underneath him. The second one was in the battle of Iwo Jima (which is Italian for "over cooked pasta noodles"). He was in the radar tower 80 feet above the carrier deck, which was 60 feet above the water when he watched the two kamakazi radar blips approach from both sides of the ship and blow the smithereens out of the wooden flight deck.

He dove into the drink, cracked three vertabrae and spent the night bobbing in the inky black listening to the sharks whittle away at what was left of the 800 men on board.

For some reason, I decided I should be a naval officer and go to Annapolis. It had to do with the Boy Scouts. My father woke screaming in nightmares well into my late childhood.

That was before the 60's, Bob Dylan, free Jimmy Hendrix concerts in the Boulder park, the Students for a Democratic Socienty, University anti-vietnam war riots, hashish, Erik Claptom and mesciline escalators to elevated levels of consciousness.

The draft figured you were good for four years of student deferment, started to pant if you stretched college into year five and at year six, you were just another wad of cannon fodder for Exxon's unquenchable thirst for the undersea deposits of liquid black gold that lay dangerously off the coast of South Vietnam where that nasty little Ho Chi Minn could get his grudgingly communist grubby fingers on it.

I was screaming up on the end of year five living and playing in the wonderful ivory tower daze of physics, non-euclidean geometry, French, mid-evil English Literature and geomorphology...some of which I climbed.

There was a notice to appear for a draft physical, weeks of panic and brief, but life-saving reprieve with a temporary stay of army infantry-style execution because a doctor at the C.U. medical center was burning a plantars wart out of the sole of my foot by boring a hole you could stick a pencil through with bi-chlorocedic acid. I couldn't march.

A friend of a friend got me a well-secreted billet in the U.S. Navy Reserve on a fast track to becomming a Naval Officer...which I figured would probably be some kind of state-side duty chasing Waves around a senic commesary.

They sent me as a mid-shipman to Naval Officer Candidate School, Newport Rhode Island. Wool dress blue uniforms, M-1 rifles, full parade dress, 90 degrees and 90% humidity...they stood us in the blazing sun for two and a half hours while they awarded 7 post-humous bronze stars to Ensigns from the class last summer who had been killed commanding river patrol boats in the Mekong Delta.

The miracles began. But the price would come later. Quite probably, it will never end.

Where have all the flowers....

I woke with a start bathed in the first light an hour before that Sunday's dawn with an uncontrollable urge to move. I dawned the dress white officer's uniform, shouldered the camera and set out walking the streets of Newport before even the dogs would wake.

The stirring within me churned the didactic, mindless assumptions of a man's obligation to military service against the newfound reverance for life and heart the 60s had released within me...for the first time in an otherwise tortured and conformist life.

They wouldn't mix. They would never mix. They just don't mix.

I stood in the gravestone garden beside a 300 year old stone Episcapalean Church transfixed as the first morning sun touched me. There was a tapping on my back...I was sure I was alone.

The man was very short, probably in his 50's and a priest. He looked up at me and said..."why dont't you come to church...Malcom Boyd is doing the folk mass and Pete Seeger is singing...they've just wound down the Newport Folk Festival."

I had made that rebellious swing from the highschool icon being groomed for the Methodist Ministry to the smuggly resolved and defiant 60's athiest on the venomed heels of Jean Paul Sartre and Ayan Rand. No way was I going back inside a church.

At 11 am I was standing back in the graveyard, staring at the church, now bulging with parissioners and with no sense whatsoever of how I got back there. As I peered through the doorway, a Navy commander with an extra seat in family box beconed the young midshipman over and I sat down.

I can remember Seeger starting to sing..."where have all the flowers gone...long time passing"....songs like a thousand others that would become...had become...the mantras of a movement that would eventually put an end to an insane war.

There was a blinding ball of fiery white light in front of me. It masked out all other reality. I heard Pete's voice, but there was something else... and I knew why I was there and what I had to do. The tears flooded through me like a river of clear passion...but one whose flood would not soon end.

The priest was the bishop of the arch-diosis. He was standing at the door as the congregation left. He took one look at me and ushered me to his office upstairs. I told him what I had seen. One of his parisioners was the commander of the Naval Officer Training Command. He called him. As he hung up the phone he told me to go back to the barracks and wait.

The next day I walked into the Commander's Office, looked him straight in the eyes and told him that not only would I not kill another human being, but if they placed me in a position of command, neither wuld I order any other man to kill one.

That apparently didn't set well with the Atlantic Fleet. Three days later, I was sitting back on the couch in my Boulder Apartment in a madras shirt.

Ivory Towers and an Iron Pig...

I was scared, but I was also an opportunist. If I wouldn't be an officer, they would make me a sailor...bell bottoms, goofey hats and pants with a thirteen button front flap...apparently to prevent enlisted men from peeing unless absolutely needed.

The Navy's strategy is to stuff you in a barracks (this one was on Coronado Island, San Diego) for a couple of months while someone in Washington decides what to do with you. I found another Navy Commander in charge of the enlisted training school with a television studio and no one to run it. I could. I did. He decided he'd keep me...I'd make him famous...he'd be on the training films. He called Washington. When he hung up the phone he had a very strange look on his face and didn't want to talk.

Three days later my first set of orders arrived...a river patrol boat in the Mekong Delta.

The Navy gives you a choice. You can turn down the first two sets of orders...number three they shove down your throat. I dumped number one and went back to running the video cameras.

Number two was a mine sweeper off the coast of North Vietnam. The life expectancy of the river patrol boat detail was about 90 days. My enlistment was for two years. Seamen on minesweepers manned the 50 calibre machine guns on the front deck and lasted less than a month. Someone wanted me gone.

The second unexplainable miracles was a potbellied, nearly senile, barely mobile senior chief petty officer who didn't know me from Adam and had no reason to befriend, much less actually do anything at all for a fled college seaman.

I told him the story...years of journalism, radio, television, a studio with no one to run it and a commander who wanted me in San Diego. He picked up the phone...the man on the other end was the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy in Washington, DC...the highest ranking enlisted man in the Navy...the one who wrote the orders for everyone...and an old shipmate of the man who had just befriended me.

"Duncan??? ya I know about him. His file is sitting right here on my desk. I don't know who he pissed off, but I've got very specific orders from way the hell and gone up there that this boy is going to the jungle and they don't want him coming back."

It's not as unusual as you might think that although in war the enemy is definately out to kill you...that does not mean that there aren't elements in your own military machine with exactly the same objective.

The realization does not usually come couched in a reassuring form when the uniform you wear means that it is to them that you belong.

 I didnt want to kill or harm anyone...I was perfectly content in the Ivory Towers of the University of Colorado. For reasons I had no part in creating there was half a country half a world away who wanted to see me dead...and would soon. Now, it became apparent, that my own militray...one I helped finance with the federal witholding from my meager wages from shelving books at the Norlin Library...my own country...also wanted me dead and were very close to getting that end accomplished.

What was the blinding ball of white lite in the church in Newport...what did it have to do with Pete Seeger and why would a career petty officer...a "lifer" who I knew not from adam materialize just in time to thwart my murder???

The Senior Chief turned beet red. He screamed into the phone..."Cliff, you and I both know that this is bullshit. This man has a talent and I'm sick of seeing this man's Navy waste it. There's a place and a need for him here...why don't you do something right for a change instead of kissing some officer's ass?"

They apparently knew each other fairly well.

When he hung up the phone, he looked up at me and said..."well, I just saved your life. You're going to war...they won't back down. But I got you on an aircraft carrier and out of the jungle...now here's what you do."

The man was a genius and to this day there is no reason I have ever been able to find for him to do what he did. I did exactly what he told me.

They flew me to Japan, I checked on board a rusty, stinking, leaky gargantuan hulk of battle weary steel (we later dubbed "The Iron Pig")(It had been commissioned at the end of World War II and in fact, my father had sailed with it before the one he was on sank). When the petty officer at the gang plank wasn't looking, I ditched my seabag and disappeared into the bowels of an 8 story city of 3000 men until I found the Public Affairs Office. There I commandeered a chair and waited 3 days for the Public Affairs Officer to appear, convinced him I could run a radio and television studio...which he had...and I did.

And then, we went to war.

Men of Conscience on a Sea That's Not

There are any number of soul grinding dilemas in war. Fear versus duty...hatred versus fear...drudgery versus zeal...corruption versus patriotism. But one of the most debilitating has to be entrapment versus objection.

You might think that an aircraft carrier 30 miles off the DMZ would be as nice and safe a place as one who hesitated just a bit too long might garner. Every inch of it was laced with death.

Super heated steam pipes are famous for developing invisable pinhole leaks that cut sailors in two. One ran the lengh of my bunk overhead. Landing jet bombers on a bobbing carrier is like trying to hit a postage stamp with a sledge hammer. On my first bridge watch one came in too low, hit the round-down rear of the carrier deck, dislodged its hung up 500 pound bomb which careened at 80 miles an hour 4 feet off the flight deck and hit an airman mid section, splattered his blood and guts all over the flight crew and the ignited aviation fuel sent a 65 foot high wall of flames over the length of the flight deck.

At night we sit on the flight deck and take bets at whether the surface to air missles the viet cong was pitching at us from the shore would fall short or go long. Unspoken, but in everyone's nightmares was the question..."what if it's neither?"