Vietnam broke the back of any kind of solidarity in this country, and former Senator Larry Pressler's opin (NY Times Editorial) that 'responsibility' was shirked by too many and that there was a responsibility to engage in what was clearly a disastrous decision (to fight that war at all) is after the fact. Perhaps, as in Bush-Cheney (who also started a devastating & unnecesary war), chickenhawks who had other priorities than going to Vietnam, should be called on their hypocrisy. However, many of us did not choose to engage in murderous moral calamity and felt our responsibility to protest by not going to Vietnam. And by the way, those of us who did try for conscientious objector status were rebuffed if we did not qualify with the right religious background. True, some went to Canada; some learned how to fail the draft physical; some committed suicide or got lost in the mountains of New Mexico. None of this was taken lightly by many of us. But the idea of serving and killing in a clearly unjustifiable war was not an option some of us saw as Pressler apparently does. When I was young, I wrote a letter to Robert Graves, with whom I had spent time in Mallorca as a young American poet. Graves, who was nearly killed in WW1, wrote back that I would not have a say in the peace that would follow if I did not serve, but he was (in the same letter) praising the decision of Cassius Clay (Muhammed Ali) whose opposition to the war involved a battle on two fronts, racist America and a racial-tinged war in Vietnam, which Dr. King eloquently spoke of a year before his murder.

Bill Pearlman