WHY I AM NOT A VETERAN

 One more aspect on the amazing career of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison - he is probably the reason I was not drafted.  I originally applied to be a conscientious objector, and this is while on scholarship at Tulane.  All students who maintained a B average were exempt from the draft during the four years of undergraduate study.  Because of my application to be a CO, I did lose friends after the FBI visited them to inquire about me.  I tried to implement some of the pacifist theory when I joined CORE as it came to NO, and after training in non violent reactions, partook in the first major sit-in in NO since Plessy.  Consequently, I had to move from my parents hone due to threats on the phone - curses, theats to bomb us, etc., but the segregationists knew my folks were segs too -they were not after them, they wanted me.  I roomed with another CORE guy, white, student at Loyola, staunch Roman Catholic.  He was a year older than I, but had not finished under graduate study.  Only after sharing the flat with him did I discover he was legally blind.  One night I returned, and he had a box - I want you to learn how to use this.  I opened it, there was a weapon, a Ruger.  I did not want to do it, for there would go my pacifism.  But then, how could I make a legally blind man protect us, and me do nothing?  I realized we were not getting threatening calls, because we had no phone.  And if the racists did attack us, we could not call for help.  I learnt how to shoot, and perhaps a month later wrote my draft board, that I no requested the CO status (which it never gave me).

    At a certain point, I volunteered for the navy.  All went well till they inquired about arrests.  Because of the sit-in, I was a convicted felon (the Mayor was determined to punish us hard.)  I was told there that the federal law said no convicted felons could volunteer. but the felons  could be drafted.

    Some months later, draft notice, and I went to the large Custom's House federal building on Canal St, near the Mississippi  River.  About 60 of us quitely silent or whispering to a neighbor, but a Black Muslim going to the blacks openly urging that blacks refuse to be inducted for the white man.  Hee was ordered to stop; he refused.  Then all of the rest were ordered to an adjoining room.  The Muslim was left alon in the first room alone.  The rest of us had to fill out forms, etc. and we received chicken in a box which we were not to eat until on the bus to Fort Chafee in Arkansas.  Fill out forms, etc.  Told them I was a convicted felon, could not volunteer, but could be drafted.  They told me I would first have to talk to the FBI man when he finished interviewing the black in the next room.  I did, and t FBI agent told me he would have to get DA Garrison to drop the charge so I could be drafted.  He told me, wait for the decision, go home, and you can take the box of chicken with you.  Went home and waited, but I assume Garrison never dropped the charges.  Case eventually went to the US Supreme Court, and we won.  Never got a draft notice  to be inducted, but suspect, they did not want agitators.  

     Jackie Robinson had been judged to be court-martialed out of the army during in WWII after he refused to move to the back of an Army bus in Texas.  Because of he was doing what Rosa Parks would do a little later, some officials wanted him court marshalled.  Pressure from above and the previous convictions erased, and Robinson would eventually be honorably discharged.  The Army backed down. 

      I have wondered what would have happened had I been inducted.  Vietnam was growing as a war, so that was a possibility.  But I had learnt some German at Tulane, and might well have been assigned there, as there had recently been the crisis about the building of the Berlin Wall.  I might have enjoyed at trip to Germany.

      On the other hand, I was shocked to open page 1 of the New York Times, June 12, 1966, and read the story of Adam R. Weber, Jr. a young black from New Orleans, whom I knew casually, - he was refusing to take up his rifle against the Vietnamese people.  Would I have had such courage?  Did the Army want agitators?  Civil rights activists?  Probably, not.  But if NO DA Jim Garrison would not drop the Woolworth felony case, the buck stopped with him.

    I greatly admire Garrison for the courage to take on the CIA and other government agencies in his search for the truth about the murder in Dallas.  But Garrison was not liberal on all issues.

      HUGH MURRAY