I talked with Friends Jour­nal author Ronald Marul­lo this week. His arti­cle, “I Aint’ March­ing Any­more” (a nod to Phil Ochs of course), recounts his path to con­sci­en­tious objec­tion dur­ing the Viet­nam war, helped by a very knowl­edgable Quak­er coun­selor. It always amazes me that just a few con­ver­sa­tions at the right time can help some­one clar­i­fy their beliefs and set their lives on a dif­fer­ent path.

I was espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in talk­ing about the after-effects of the CO process since I went through some­thing sim­i­lar myself. Around age 17 my father start­ed lob­by­ing hard for me to go to the Naval Acad­e­my at Annapo­lis. Except for a few years in Pres­by­ter­ian Sun­day School we had grown up most­ly a‑religious and I found the idea intrigu­ing. I think in ret­ro­spect I was most­ly excit­ed by the idea of an order­ly life that might address my ADHD (called hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty in those days). I got far enough into the process to take a phys­i­cal and get a let­ter of com­men­da­tion from our con­gressper­son but then thought more about the mil­i­tary itself. I real­ized I did­n’t feel com­fort­able join­ing an orga­ni­za­tion whose pur­pose was threat­en­ing to kill. I had on prin­ci­ple, and with­out much delib­er­a­tion, decid­ed not to engage in school­yard fights years before, and suf­fered the reg­u­lar humil­i­a­tions that comes of being the small­est kid in class who every­one knows won’t fight back. To the dis­ap­point­ment of my father I stopped the appli­ca­tion process for the navy. As I pon­dered what to do next, I asked myself what oth­er val­ues might come from my new­found paci­fism. Over the next few years I explored var­i­ous leads and — being in the Philadel­phia area — start­ed run­ning into Quak­ers, some of whom had a kind of inner con­vic­tion I found intriguing.

So while I was far too young to ever wor­ry about a draft, I did have a sim­i­lar defin­ing “what do I believe” moment as a teenag­er. As Ron says in our author chat pod­cast:

That was a turn­ing point in my life. I made deci­sions from fill­ing out those forms and answer­ing those ques­tions actu­al­ly made con­crete what I had inside me, ide­al­ly. You think about this and think about that and whether or not you hold it true. But when you have to put it all on paper and you have to sub­mit it to the world, it changes you. And I’ve lived by that phi­los­o­phy since that age. I’ve done it in my edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence with chil­dren. I’ve done it in my pri­vate life with friends, care­giv­ing oth­ers. My wife and I have been doing that, you know, for decades.

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