Are You a Conscientous Objector?

On Saturday, September 26, 2009, in Austin, Texas there was an assembly to honor Conscientious Objection. This included having CO values and commitments to any thing that one chooses to make a stand to oppose. One panel had a group of Desert Storm and Iraq Occupation occupations, with panel members describing how their combat experiences triggered PTSD and its concomitant symptoms.

The purpose of the assembly was to honor all those who are Cos; this may include being conscientiously opposed to paying taxes to pay for the U.S. Military or to a service member who takes a stand against the Corporation-Military Complex by making application for Conscientous Objection. Honor is a vital key to creating any sort of community; many cultures practice honor as a regular part of their deep and surface structures by their honoring traditions, notably Native Americans in North America. Men can honor their elders who came before them; women can honor their sheroes who took stands against various injustices perpetrated against them and others. Seems like it’s a good practice to honor anyone older than we are or who come from the generation that came before us.

Unfortunately, our culture highly values the ‘glorious deeds’ of military service and war. We want to be triumphant in all we do and say; the propaganda of the state rolls out its script whenever a war happens, giving the entire society the norms of what it means to be patriotic in our day and time. Sadly, the war spirit, with all of its emotional content too many times keeps people in a mental state of inertia with the symptoms of narrow definitions of patriotism. Would it not be patriotic, as happened to one WWII CO, to do some kind of alternate service? Instead, the residents of the small town he lived in thought he was crazy, a slacker, and not patriotic simply because he didn’t want to kill anyone.

As we have seen recently, from the narratives of “Bush and Cheney’s War,” many lies concerning the facts on the ground were told to the American people. Clearly, there was no respect shown to us here. And having telecom companies spy into our phone conversations is the antithesis of a free and open society and flies in the face of the Constitution. There have been many allegedly illegal acts foisted on the military and the citizens, all in the name of the War on Terror.

Personally, this entire experience was deeply moving and refined my thoughts and memories to some new insights. One of those is that being a CO may be seen in a very broad panorama, and goes way beyond the boundaries of being a military CO. One can be a CO who is opposed to globalism, and dissents by choosing to live an alternate lifestyle. A friend of mine is adamant about helping to keep his community environment clean and spends hours cleaning up trash. He is conscientiously opposed to a non-hygenic and ugly landscape in the city where he lives.

For me, when I was discharged in the beginning of 1971 there was no hero’s welcome; I had been a member of an unorthodox church denomination that had a lengthily tradition of pacifism going back to the Civil War. It also espoused various other religious practices that more or less drew a line in the sand between orthodox and unorthodox Christianity. I was a relatively new member in this denomination when I faced my own crisis of conscience at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. With their assistance, I wrote my application for CO.

When I was released, after spending time in house arrest, and a minimum-security prison within the confines of the military base, I was clinically depressed, and my spirit had suffered severe pummeling. Not one minister or administrative member from this denomination really sat down with me to debrief the experience, nor counsel me about the kinds of symptoms I might see in myself due to this trauma. The term PTSD wasn’t even created yet. Going back to WWI and WWII PTSD was called battle fatigue or shell shock, but what about COs who never saw combat experience but were just as much impacted by the system as they were. Combat vets could show their physical wounds, but I could show my psycho-spiritual ones.

In 2007 or so I decided to write a book called The Invisible Warrior (2008) (available by going to http://www.xlibris.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or http://www.bn.com/). This was a chronicle of my journey as a Vietnam Era Vet CO, and the kinds of experiences, both humiliating and scintillating, that I encountered in my resistance to military service and war. It’s a collection of reflections of what I learned. As time went on, I noticed more and more PTSD symptoms in my life, even though I didn’t wear that diagnostic label. At the very least I was diagnosed as having a Depressive Disorder accompanied by an Anxiety Disorder.

It was then that I decided to make an appeal to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. However, the military system is based on really not trusting your own instincts (I realize this may vary with the kind of superior you’ve got), but those of the powers above you. It is courageous and brave to be so counter-cultural to trust yourself that you’ve had certain symptoms you can read about in the Diagnostic Manual. We, after all, know our bodies and minds better than anyone else; you may ask, “Yes, we do know ourselves the best, but someone who is dealing with an assessed mental illness is out of touch with reality, so how could this person trust herself to make a clear-thinking diagnosis?” That’s a very good question. But there are various kinds of psychiatric diagnoses, many of which don’t include psychosis, meaning a break with reality.

It’s true that some may not be able to function enough so as not to be able to do this, but for many of us, who are functioning enough can see the tree that is squarely in front of us. Needless to say, my application was denied, but I had to follow my own conscience here too.

Honor is the tonic we need to restore trust and community. Respect and honor are two curative properties for healing trauma. A drink of honor is equal to a gallon of cure. Most importantly we must honor ourselves; guard against shame (“I am a mistake”) and guilt (“Oh no I did something wrong; I’ll be punished; better not to do anything else than what I’m told to do. How high was that you wanted me to jump?”). When we take steps to put our true selves on the line, after thinking about the many consequences this decision will engender, the voices of doubt, uncertainty and self-hate will try to take over. Speak the truth first by loving yourself in all your nobility and warrior-like qualities. We are the pure gold found in a rock at the bottom of the streambed. We have shined beautifully.

© Christopher Bear Beam, MA 10/09