When Soldiers Resist
This Memorial Day, let's remember the courageous war resisters who said no to the slaughter in Vietnam.
Police halt an effort to throw a casket over the White House fence protesting the Vietnam War October 15, 1969 as part of the Moratorium Against the War. Washington Area Spark / Flickr
On August 10, 1965, less than two months after General William Westmoreland launched the first major offensive by American ground forces in Vietnam, Congressmen L. Mendel Rivers (D-South Carolina) and William Bray (R-Indiana) sponsored an amendment to the Selective Service Act, the law that outlined the terms of the military draft. Rivers and Bray added only four words to it: “knowingly destroys, knowingly mutilates.”
Repulsed by a mass protest on the Washington Mall on the twentieth anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — where draft cards were publicly burned by those summoned to Vietnam — the congressmen led a charge to instill fear in the hearts of would-be war resisters.
Rivers, the self-proclaimed “granddaddy of the war hawks” and an enthusiastic segregationist, promoted his amendment before Congress:
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