The Canadian Friend

September-October 1998


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Going Home

Carl Stieren, Ottawa MM

It was a long road home, filled with tears and laughter. I didn’t want to go - I wasn’t sure I could face a conference full of all those women and men who, like me, had one goal in 1968: End the War in Vietnam. But something called me back, and two days before registration closed, I registered. The conference was organized by Pendle Hill, the Quaker study centre in Pennsylvania, and was entitled “Friends and the Vietnam War: A Gathering for Recollection, Reappraisal, and Looking Ahead.”

I drove the 700 kilometres from Ottawa to Bryn Mawr, stopping at Rochester, N.Y. to pick up a remarkable man named Ken Maher. He had worked in the Buffalo Meeting House in the late 1960s, shepherding hundreds of draft resisters and deserters across the border. He was the other side of the Underground Railroad. On our side were Jack and Nancy Pocock of Toronto Monthly Meeting, the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, and dozens - perhaps hundreds - of individual Friends, plus thousands of supporters from other parts of society. Somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 young American men of draft age came to Canada during the Vietnam War. Most went back. I stayed. So did between three dozen and two hundred young American Friends - nobody knows the exact numbers.

When Ken and I arrived on the campus of Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia, where the organizers, expecting large numbers, had moved the conference, the past came to life.

There was a collection of articles and letters by Norman Morrison, the American Quaker who, in his own witness against the U.S. War in Vietnam, had burned himself to death outside the Pentagon on November 2, 1965. His widow, Anne Morrison Welsh, a North Carolina Friend, spoke to us about her own witness and her husband’s sacrifice.

Lou Schneider of American Friends Service Committee during the Vietnam years, opened the conference with an agonizing question about the effects of conscientious objection and the witness of Friends. Of course, as Friends, we’re not supposed to worry about the effectiveness of our witness - it is simply supposed to be of the Spirit, tested in a Friends Meeting. Yet the effects of our actions - or the lack of them - were on all our minds.

“There is now no significant peace movement in the United States,” he told the group. “There hasn’t been a draft in over a quarter century. Does dwindling immediacy necessarily neutralize us? Can there be a continuance of witness informed and enlivened by past experience?”

Others told of moments that seemed to define history.

“We were creating institutions and acting from them,” said Jerry Coffin. “Unfortunately, many of them revolved around sex, drugs and rock and roll. But I was arrested at the Pentagon in 1967, and kept in jail for 21 days. I didn’t think I was going to be coming out.”

Peter Blood, the co-editor with Annie Patterson of the folk song book, Rise Up Singing, told of his traveling witness against the War. He told about waiting for his arrest by law enforcement agents who had surrounded the Meeting House where he was staying.

Kathleen Hertzberg of Toronto Meeting, who was Clerk of Canadian Friends Service Committee from 1964 to 1970, spoke about Canadian Friends’ witness to those suffering in all parts of Vietnam. During that time, not only Canadian Friends, but thousands of American Friends sent money to CFSC for medical aid to Vietnam. CFSC’s medical supplies were divided equally among the Red Cross societies of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.

If Kathleen hadn’t spoken, another version of history might have been accepted by the group. That version was that American Friends Service Committee aided all parts of Vietnam. I remember those years as ones in which AFSC resisted the pressure from American Friends, me among them, to do so. AFSC feared the loss of its charitable status - and the endangerment of its other programs - if it sent aid to countries listed in the American “Trading with the Enemy” law. A Quaker Action Group was founded at this time, and sent the ship The Phoenix, to North Vietnam with medical supplies because of the inaction by AFSC. The eventual aid from AFSC was a small amount. When an AFSC staffer from those days spoke of their aid to the National Liberation Front’s Red Cross Society, she said the value of one of only a few shipments was “perhaps $20,000”. The budget of AFSC’s Quang Ngai rehabilitation centre in South Vietnam alone was around $2,000,000. Those numbers give a different perspective.

The end of the conference didn’t really come for me until the night before I wrote this story, when I and other Friends from Ottawa Meeting heard Arlo Guthrie sing “Alice’s Restaurant” at the Ottawa Folk Festival. Many of us remembered - many of us had been there.