Conscientious Objectors Slow a War Effort

David Chomsky, brother of Noam, was married to a woman who gave military legal counseling to sailors of the USS Nitro, docked at Sandy Hook, NJ to pick up fragmentation bombs for the Vietnam War. Annie LaBois of France was there in Leonardo, NJ with me as advance liaison for the Stone House community of West Philadelphia in 1971. Lillian Willoughby and about fifty others sat on the railroad tracks to symbolically prevent munitions from reaching the Nitro. When she sailed, Annie LaBois and I were in a canoe urging them not to go, along with Bradford Little and others. Four sailors jumped into the Atlantic rather than go to war. They greeted Annie and I with brotherhood/sisterhood handclasps as we were all put into the same Coast Guard vessel.

Annie and I had been capsized near the churning propellers of the Nitro… so we had our brush with death far from the shores of Vietnam. Margaret Mead is said to have mentioned our action in a radio broadcast I never was able to hear. By the time the Nitro got to the Philippines, enough officers had applied for Conscientious Objector status that the Nitro could not be sent into the war zone until that situation could be resolved. Maybe we did not stop the war that day, but we slowed it.

Now my doctor today is a Physician Assistant born in Cambodia, who moved to Washington at age 8 months. I serve as secretary for the Yakima County NAACP and stories… we have a bunch!

The best news is that we can do something now to make the world even better than we now find it.