NONFICTION - Oct. 17, 1993

THE STRENGTH NOT TO FIGHT: An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors of the Vietnam War by James W. Tollefson (Little, Brown: $22.95; 248 pp.). When James Tollefson applied for conscientious objector status in 1968, soon after drawing a low number in the Vietnam draft lottery, his mother wrote the draft board, “Sometimes it’s difficult to see our son for what he truly is and not what we would have him to be.” With U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia now generally discredited, it’s easy to forget that even half-hearted support of war resistance, as that shown by Tollefson’s mother, was unusual; more typical, it seems, was fathers refusing forever to speak with “unpatriotic” sons, friends turning over friends to the FBI, loyal but pacifist citizens becoming permanent exiles, young men of principle spending hard time--years--in federal prison. Tollefson, now a professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, reminds us of a sad chapter in U.S. history in publishing these first-person accounts of conscientious objection, in which COs tell of jurors sobbing as they vote to convict a defendant of burning draft files, prison guards seeking out jailed war resisters to shake their hands, draftees with CO status who served on Vietnam’s front lines as medics, family reunions at which decades-old political rifts are finally overlooked, if not buried. There’s great material here--one future CO, ROTC at Stanford, recalls having helicopter practice canceled at Ft. Benning because the craft were being used to make the John Wayne film “The Green Berets”--but its power is diluted by the author’s decision to organize the book in terms of CO experiences--trials, service, self-exile and so on--rather than as individual stories: instead of start-to-finish narratives we get puzzle pieces that fit together only haphazardly. Some of those pieces, though, speak volumes, as the CO who spent two years in Leavenworth but can still say, 20 years after the fact, “I was only a kid. But I was right.”