Conscientious Objection poll

[hunter]

49. My father-in-law was a medic. He told the Navy flat out he'd never shoot anyone.

He wouldn't hold a gun.

He missed out on active duty in Korea by strange fortune. Instead they used him in atomic bomb experiments. He's one of the few people I've met who has witnessed atomic bomb explosions up close and once walked into ground zero while things were still on fire. Afterwards, him and all the guys he was with discarded their clothing and scrubbed the fallout off themselves until the radiation detectors said they were "safe." It wasn't a safe level for many people. My father-in-law was lucky.



My dad's eyes weren't good, so the Army made him a clerk. He'd probably have been a M.A.S.H. "Radar" sort of character if they'd sent him to Korea. He's an artist and a lover and a gardener among his many talents, not a warrior.

My dad's dad was an Army Air Force officer in World War II. He was obsessed with airplanes, in what we now know as an "autistic spectrum" kind of way. He wanted to fly, really really very badly, but his physical coordination and sense of balance were not adequate. He was a bit of a klutz. Hell, I can say it now, many years after his passing, he was frightened by bicycles. How do those things stay up? He couldn't do the math in his head fast enough. But otherwise he was very gifted with mechanical things.

He was later one of the many engineers who worked on the Apollo Project. Somewhere in his military service he'd acquired a familiarity with titanium. My grandfather never ever talked about his military service, I think some of it may have been dirty and abhorrent, but I got my enthusiasm for science and engineering and space exploration from him. His contributions to the moon landing were his proudest achievement.

My mom's dad was a Conscientious Objector during World War II. My mom's family were religious dissidents and pacifists, which is why they left Europe in the 1800's and ran as fast as they could into America's Wild West, later to find themselves in the heart of Mormon country, where they could make a living raising cattle, procuring booze, and mediating unseemly disputes between Mormons, very, very discreetly. The U.S.A. military gave my mom's dad a choice: prison or building Liberty and Victory ships. He chose to build ships. During the war he once got beaten bloody by the cops for protesting the Japanese Internment. They were taking away his neighbors.

My mom has a friend who was coincidently protected by a Mormon family. They "bought" the family's California property and invited them to work for them in Utah. When the war was over they "sold" the property back to the Japanese family, honest dealings all around, all profit to the original Japanese owners, enough to get them back on their feet again. Unfortunately that was not the norm in such dealings. Many very valuable Pacific Coast properties were lost to Japanese-American families by false promises.

My parents raised me and all my siblings as pacifists. When the war in Vietnam ended we were all thoroughly Quaker, and I was not yet quite old enough to be drafted. Had I been, I'm pretty sure they'd have bought me safe passage to someplace beyond the U.S.A. draft boards' reach.