PATRIOTISM MEANS RESISTANCE
The American Experience of White, Middle-Class, Male Anti-Vietnam Draft Raiders in the Government’s Courtroom
The Trials of the Minnesota 8
Francis X. Kroncke
Pre-prison Manuscript – 1971
©fxkroncke 1972, 2002
Dedication - 2002
In 1972 Barthold Fles, then an elderly New York literary agent, believed that this text and story should be told. I had written and assembled the text and information to speak to the times. However, during those times there was scant outlet for truly radical analysis or presentation of the full human dimension to current events. This is true despite what some might think was a profusion of stories about and presentation of views of the counter-culture, radical politics and all that. In fact, very little serious analysis and reporting occurred. Despite its self-congratulatory self-description as the Liberal Press, there was very little classically Liberal about the times. Walter Cronkite is the icon of how the Establishment finessed the Movement – possibly the most significant figure in the Orwellian drama of the times called The Sixties. Barthold Fles was one person who championed our cause, only to validate these present remarks.
Today, “The Sixties” remains a cartoon for both mainline Liberals and Conservatives. The phrase invokes prankish memories of youth, with just about every major commentator from each camp assuring his children and grandchildren that, indeed, Daddy/Mommy were Hippies! Free wheelin’ – dope smokin’ – bad attitude … hmm, well, kids – it was only long hair, an occasional joint, peeks at centerfolds … My campus had anti-war rallies! (That’s where I met your mother.) I thought about going to Canada. … As idealistic as some of us were – and the word innocent has its rightful play as an adjective – the story which follows is of the few – very, very few – who stepped forward to risk their lives as only youth, it seems, has the courage to do. … Our story still speaks – challenges! – the youth of The Sixties!
Another story is, “What has happened to the Minnesota 8?” I dedicate this internet edition of 2002 to them, their kids, families and broader community. I know that among the group one went back to prison. Others excelled: a lawyer, a professor … others to make a living: several sales reps, a tennis pro … one faithful Radical: anarchist forever! … and so it goes.
What strikes me upon reading this, at least in reference to myself, is that I have not fundamentally changed. My language and spiritual experiences have transformed – as the stories on www.earthfolk.net show. How I could act in private and public spaces, these have been altered. “The Sixties” denotes more of a Crack-in-Time … one of those unusual mythic moments which enable people to peer at their culture and themselves and see in curious and precious ways. However, the only real difference between “The Sixties” and “today” is that the peering was, then, public. One could be private in public – commit an act of conscience, here, of civil disobedience. And in doing so express yourself symbolically – which is one aspect of mythic expression. Just for this time called The Sixties was the culture as a whole open – if only a crack – to listen and discuss and act upon (our punishment being this public act) our symbolic discourse. Such has faded during the psychic and mythic numbing of the last several decades. In this light, I am publishing because this story is about now. About how you might be challenged to act when another Crack-in-Time occurs. “The Sixties” are a mythic moment which is Ever-Present (in illo tempore). Resist!
Dedication - 1971
While writing this book I strove to serve the families of the Eight whose spirits tore the curtain of these times apart. A small book I thought for the many page‑thumbing hands which seek to know who Resisters are, and some moments of this great American lifestyle. Yet more I was compelled by my unending spirited dialogue with my Dad, Charles Otto Kroncke Jr., who questions, prods and guides me from beyond his earthy death. Oh, my family Kroncke‑Sofio‑Coniglio‑Larson, so many passions and people! … brothers and sisters now into the second generations ...to speak with them, to embrace with them life's truth ...so many hours by the typer they hovered intimate with me. And Karen whose story my personal Resistance really is ... she with whom these words are song and dance. Joleen and the Clarks, deeply through the eyes of Eddie, which asked for more pathways to be marked out. Ah, it's impossible for a Resister to dedicate any work to just one person. Resistance is a collective Body and communal Voice. But, Meridel LeSueur, all must know that your moonlight fire has chased me down the rounding sky to the earth horizon of my own sunrise. Meridel, our rainbow stone mother, you have set a-tremble the fires of our Family's Heart. Among these whirlwind human fires rise my sleep crying tremblings ‑‑ the cold memories of a life's dark water child's
Oh, my noble brother Joseph William, when your eyes turned aside while the choke of living death quaked your two-year-old body -‑ you spoke a passion and a wisdom, a quest: "Fear no pain nor evil, live life in its fullest truth." Mother Marie who must pack this book with her, take it forever alongside her steps ‑‑explaining, celebrating, growing, crying and hurting with the times ...yet even becoming a newer and stronger Resistance spirit ... my friend, Marie Veronica, I love you.
I. The Raid, the Ambush, the “Minnesota 8”.
II. From the bars of the County Jail to the guns of the “Armed Courtroom”.
III. No defense, no trial: “Vietnam: irrelevant and immaterial.”.
IV. Witnesses of Facts & Witnesses with Faces.
V. Resistance Grows Another Body: the testimony of Francis X. Kroncke.
VI. The Judge’s Final Instructions: tribute paid to Caesar
FILTER 1: SUNDOWN RED: The Healing Feminine Spirits.
FILTER 2: SILVER BLUE: Festivals.
FILTER 3: COFFEE BROWN: The Families Speak of Jails and Free Spirits.
FILTER 4: DUSTY YELLOW: Media As Tool For Social Control
The Body of which this book is a gesture is tall in stature, healthy in bone and muscle, and smiling in its spirits. The sustaining spirit comes from the unity of the organic parts. Yet each small part has its own distinct person and power.
The rounding belly receives its fullness and stamina from Charles, my brother who fed the hunger of the everyday with the generosity of his material gifts, which were but the symbols of his affection. To the limbering and relaxing of our collective body, Karen Clark placed in labor her healing hands. Meridel Le Sueur, our rainbow stone Mother, drew out the earth holy passions of our communal, Resistance heart.
Our memories were bespoken in the poems of Millie Beneke, and brought back in facts through tapestries of Joan Tilton and Mary Simmons' family files. From afar comes the eyes of Boyd Hagen, Cheryl Walsh, and Rich Hale to place on paper photographs the heats and tempers of the trials' times.
The painstaking labor of revision after revision was accomplished through the skills, fingertip typing and warm affections of my sisters, Rita Kroncke, Sue Jedlinka, Sue LeFebvre, Luan McCarty, Mary Jo Penne, Viky Jaskierski, brother Dave Gutknecht. Recreation by forested spirits came through the favors of Mary and Lee Lynch who set aside a most memorable time at Reykjavik Point for Karen and me.
The worry of our mind as to the supplies and the xeroxing of our work was shouldered away by the kindnesses of Mary Morris, Sue Weil, and Scott McCoy. Direction was given us to find the personal histories of our trials' judges by Debbie Howell and Robert Lopez of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Ears to our thoughts and words, Mary Frost Kroncke, Marge Roden and Charles Bisanz, Jr. listened, criticized, and formed many helpful habits as we grew; to speak the new tongues of literature, journalese and legalese!
Peopled around us were the friends of Camelot, a Christian collective in communications which offered spaces for us to live and work in, and much patience to see our labors through. Of these fine people such helpful support has come from Laura and Thomas Di Nanni, Kathy Nelson, Rick and Sue Reuter, Don Wegscheider, Sandy Jacobs, Kamisha Samson and you, Troll.
The passions of this Body is our Twin Cities Resistance community, specifically the Committee to Defend the Eight. As true Resistance brothers and sisters, I know that your names are our Name. For all those small hours and moments together, I am most grateful. The power of our action is your power. The smile on our struggle formed face is your smile and pleasure.
"The character of the (Draft) records are no more
'irrelevant' to this matter than the character of the
records would be if these were records perhaps of
Jews being selected out for burning in the ovens of
Dachau."
Attorney Kenneth L. Tilsen during Opening Argument
"Those who act out of an allegiance to a Higher Law than the
Law of the Land are making Jungle Law."
Judge Edward Devitt at the Sentencing
"This is a difficult for me to say because, in a sense, I realize that I am naming you, in my understanding, as an immoral and evil person to people. But somewhere the problems of society go on, and somewhere people have responsibility, and you are the type of man who has had many people come before you with problems, especially with reference to the War, and you have, seemingly consistently ‑‑ as have all the judges in this District Court ‑‑ handled them in the same way, saying: “Well, the responsibility lies somewhere up there." ‑‑ with some unknown God called the State."
Defendant Frank Kroncke to Judge Philip Neville at the Sentencing
"Since the right to command is required by the moral order and has its source in God, it follows that, if civil authorities legislate for or allow anything that is contrary to the will of God, neither the laws made nor the authorizations granted can be binding on the consciences of the citizens, since we must obey God rather than men. Otherwise, authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse.”
Read several times during the trial, a quote from Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, Part II, par. 51.
"Mr. Kuesner.” “No. The only thing I have seen ‑‑ there has been some signs painted on the sidewalks saying, 'Hang the Minnesota Eight!' I don't think that would influence me."
Prospective juror’s answer during the Voir Dire examination.
My name is Frank Kroncke.
I'm an outlaw. Getting to be an outlaw was easy, legally that is. All I did was join in with seven other young men in a series of raids on Minnesota's rural draft Boards. That I became a draft‑raiding outlaw with a background steeped in the exacting Obediences and Authorities of Irish‑German Roman Catholicism is not so easy to explain. The midnight of our arrest had followed upon a day spent lecturing at St. Catherine's College on the "reviviscence" of grace in respect to Sacraments received while in the state of Mortal Sin. As you can gather, my pathways to becoming a draft‑raiding outlaw pass through some strange countryside!
Yet is was my strict monastic Roman Catholicism with its secular companion Super‑Patriotism that delivered me into the outlaw tribes of the Resistance. See, once upon a time, I lived the American Dream. For me the world was the Cross and the Flag - both neatly balanced, each to its own side, around the Tabernacle. To serve God meant to be obedient to the earthly Authorities. Catholicism meant Patriotism. A Pledge of Allegiance To the Flag began each school day, followed by a "J.M.J." (Jesus, Mary and Joseph) atop every page of my work. Democracy was the vehicle for Christianity. Lenten offerings of pennies, gathered from denied candied pleasures, went to the salvation of some "Pagan Baby" in China. Little did we question whether the money went into CIA guns instead of AID butter, for indeed to destroy a Communist meant to banish a Devil.
When it came my time to Serve in the Armed Forces, the years found me in the Franciscans, as Fr. Otto, preparing myself to be a milites Christi - a "Soldier of Christ." That I eventually became a Conscientious Objector and a Resister is more the story of my rigorous sense of Catholic morality than of some "political" conversion. I resist a Government of Illegitimate Authority. This Government of total and undeclared war is immoral and demonically possessed. My Resistance efforts strive to restore a democratic Rule with Laws and Orders responsive to our people.
To be more descriptive, I am a Catholic Radical outlaw. At least that is where this story begins and ends. Where I will be in the future days, after my caged years in prison, I'm not sure. Of all things, this is clear to me, that by becoming a Resistance outlaw I have started upon the road of a Patriotism I found outside of the Laws and Orders of our present Government, and outside the Dogmas and Canons of the present Catholic Hierarchy. If all this sounds a little confusing to you, and you find yourself asking, "How does all this go together?" then you have the question which compelled me to start writing this book. Yes, there are gaps in my life. Somehow for me draft raids and sacramental theology explain one another. Somehow for me being an outlaw is the only way to be moral. Somehow Patriotism means Resistance. How these gaps are leaped, and why I am happy to be an outlaw, is what this story is all about.
As you read remember that I am no prophet nor hero nor even "one of the good guys in the white hats." The Resistance pathway was fairly worn‑down when I set forth with my first shaky step. ME? I'm just that scrawny Kroncke kid who grew up three houses down from you at 71 West 50th Street in Bayonne, New Jersey. Remember how we tried to mark our friendship by carving our names into the heat‑softened summer asphalt with bent rusty nails? Yeah, I'm that same kid … and now I'm an outlaw.
There were so many ways I could have begun to tell you how I got from being an altar boy to raiding draft boards. To lessen the confusion surrounding the ghetto‑like experiences and language of my Catholic and theological backgrounds, I chose to develop the story around the "Minnesota Eight." Of course, our trials are the most crucial experience of my life, but as you'll soon gather, all
my political and social experiences are just expressions of my spiritual outlook. I guess that I'll always be a theologian: a person who seeks to work with that Power of which we are all a part, and only together the whole. One who sees the rainbow Hunan Face, everywhere.
However, though I try to drop a lot of theology's mysterious words, I do persist in talking about evil and the demonic. I guess that I can't help using those words, even though I know that they are "loaded." I once stopped using them, but then I couldn't find words which spoke to the true reality of the Vietnam War. After all, that is not just another war... it is not just a brushfire war, or a police action, nor is it World War III ...what it is, is a total war …A Global war... the First Cosmic War ...a war in which our Government seeks to destroy every living person and thing in the whole of Vietnam. In short for me, I realized that Vietnam is the first spiritual War. What is at battle there is the question of whether human life ...and indeed any form of life... is worth anything. Yes, wars are always brutal and by‑standers sometimes get killed ...but in this war it is no accident that civilians are killed and that everything: every idea, person, place, custom and institution is the Enemy ...it is defined that way in the Army Field Manual.
Yes, evil is something human. But by the same token it is something which possesses. Humans are the vehicles, the viruses of evil ... and to stop evil we must stop certain death styles and take from Power the people who live evilly. Like the word outlaw, there is something shocking ... something awesome, to the words evil and demonic. While in jail I came to understand, as I clenched the bars and looked out at my armed captors, that our times are criminal, that evil marches around infesting the spirits of people, and that for me to "Dare to Struggle! Dare to Win!" meant indeed to see the Powers clearly. This story then is also an attempt at a discernment of spirits.
You must know that these words which you will read have been torn from my bowels and brain, trembled forth in images from a spirit which has been humbled. As I talk about evil and the demonic, my whole person raises itself, not to destroy, but to cast out ...and hopefully, then, to reconcile.
It might be simple to say that the judges, and the Government forces, were all bad people, incapable of doing any good. But that obviously is not the case with human beings. Even the people who governed in Nazi Germany were noted for their tenderness. For example, Hitler is recorded as having had a fond love for children. Further he was described as being frantically upset with people who hurt animals. I think that most Americans would casually accept my calling Nazi Germany a death culture, but few will feel comfortable with the phrase when applied to our own Power Elite culture. They feel uncomfortable because they are living with, and some within, that ruling class.
Usually the terms "evil" and "demonic" are applied posthumously, after everyone is safely within the grave. But that, I feel, is the greatest illusion created by the death culture, i.e., that there are no death‑dealing people, no evil, no demons. Usually the passing of a judgment is left to the historian, safely protected in his tenured office‑library. The historian, because he is not a participant in the times, is presumed to be able to get to that "objective" point where human emotion is put aside and reason clearly leads the path to a proper judgment. I object to this approach for several reasons.
First, the designation of evil and the demonic is an emotional matter, a felt concern, not primarily a rational description. For example, from Reason the Nazi Empire had all the right in the world to kill the Jews. After all, Hitler was the legally elected ruler of Germany. His Laws & Order were those of a sovereign State. Those who opposed him, from within Germany, e.g., the "solitary witness" Franz Jaggerstatter, were denied a justification of reason because he broke the Law of the Reich. His and others' appeal was to morality, the felt rightness of human action. Jaggerstatter chose between good and evil - and he didn't shy away from stating the issue in those terms.
Second, history is most often written by a ruling class. Consequently, histories usually gloss over the deeply felt human realities. We talk of wars as matters of foreign policy, not in terms of murders, tortures, pillaging and suffering. Even the term "war" seems to me to be a ruling class term. For the participants, i.e., the foot-soldiers, and the victims, i.e., the mass of citizens, there is no such thing as "war". Rather, they live amidst evil. Instead of the term "the Vietnam War" why don't we talk of the butchery, raping, torturing, and the insanity that goes on daily in Indochina? Our choice of words give us our comforts. So, too, the judge calls it Law and Order when it is his method of torture and slow murder of human beings.
As an aside reflection, I'd like to mention that the bulk of the mass electronic media is controlled by the Powerful and therefore, not surprisingly, presents the Vietnam War to us as if it were "current history." The important term is "history." When we watch the news, it is handled as an historian would talk about, say, Caesar's Gallic Wars. News commentators report "facts" without emotion. They describe strategies, tactics and maneuvers. No News cast comes on with recorded faces and voices of pain, suffering, and anguish. Rather, the viewer sees jets strafing the Indochinese jungles, hears the whirl and whistle of "automated" napalm missiles ... and all this as if all that was going on was some routine exercise in super-technology which could be, and is, calculated in terms of bomb tonnage, troop levels, villages taken, and Enemy casualties.
When I use the terms evil and demonic, I use them in an effort to strike the human nerve. Somewhere the nerve center exists which coordinates the muscle of war. When one strikes a nerve, usually a piercing yelp follows. I judge the accuracy of the probe by my personal observations. And, I have found that the people with the most objections, violent reactions, and indignations at the usage of the term demonic are the powerful. However, the reaction to hitting the nerve isn't always rage and uncontrolled emotion. Most often, as with the judges, it is almost a bemused, casual "pooh‑poohing" of our accusations. This is even somewhat more appropriate, for often, when a needle hits a nerve the reaction is that of an intensity passing into numbness. Numbness seems the best image with which to describe the ruling American class' reaction to our usage of the words evil and demonic. Hitler probably laughed at those who called him demonic - and there were too few Germans who did this, especially too few Catholic Bishops - because the word was so apt that he probably didn't know what it meant.
A powerful person or class often fails to understand what terms like cruelty and evil really mean.
Most people don't use the terms evil and demonic, because they know that the terms can as well be applied to them. And I obviously grant that my illegal actions may be evil. However, when you look at the Vietnam War and all its human misery, you certainly cannot lay the cause of, and blame for, that evil at the feet of myself or any other Resister. That the powerful try to do that, is part of their attempted illusion inducing set. They are Powerful, and they can turn and twist reality to any form they want, e.g., that War is Peace.
My justification, if I need any, in using these terms to describe the judges and the Government of Death is not based on the word games of the Powerful. I have long since decided not to play their games, or worry about the scholastic refinements of their dying culture. I was bound into inaction for many years by worrying about, "How can I act, since I might be as evil as they are?" My justification is based on the faces and mangled bodies of my fellow Americans and Vietnamese, on the tortured minds and spirits of misery plagued world which scraps for bread while the Powerful drink Champagne blood. My own suffering, in body and spirit, is my knowledge of the "really real" presence of evil and the demonic within the Government and its Courts of the Powerful.
NOTE
To those interested in researching the trials of the "Minnesota Eight," I have placed a 500 page work, also entitled Patriotism Means Resistance, in the Minnesota Historical Library. This work is a thematic story of our trials told through extensive verbatim excerpts from the trial transcriptions and the newspaper accounts both underground and Establishment. This study includes longer essays about my views on Patriotism, sacramental theology, and the character of the Vietnam War as a spiritual War. With these volumes is included over two‑hundred pages of newspaper clippings and "Minnesota Eight" memorabilia, including photographs. I have personally retained a xeroxed copy of all the above, plus a massive heap of trial transcripts from all three trials.
Trial Dates & Places:
DEVITT: 2 November ‑‑ 5 November 1970: TILTON & TURCHICK, St. Paul
DEVITT: 17 November ‑‑ mistrial BENEKE, OLSON & SIMMONS, St. Paul
DEVITT: 30 November ‑‑ 3 December 1970 BENEKE, OLSON & SIMMONS, St. Paul
NEVILLE: 11 January ‑‑ 18 January 1971 KRONCKE & THERRIAULT, Minneapolis
THE RAID
My hands shook as I tried to cut diamond shape holes in the plastic bags. I was already a little late in getting the tools and the materials together. Sweat began to itch my legs. "Got to get a hold on yourself.” “Relax ‑‑ don't forget anything.” "Don't worry, Mike won't notice the time." Mike ‑‑ he'd be calmly waiting for me on the West Bank. Someone kept asking me ‑‑ trying to raise his voice from somewhere back in my head, not speaking to me directly but a vaporous asking ‑‑"Should you do it?" I was hot and hair sweaty. A slight trembling buckled me ‑‑ my knees get painfully weak when I get nervous. Just an hour before, Clare called saying that one of the southern Boards had cancelled themselves out. With cautious concern they reported that an alarm system had been installed by "Silent Knight." When I had heard that I felt really funny, like when winter numbs your skin and it tingles near frostbite. A numbing paranoia in a way. Some sense kept telling me not to go on the raid. Something kept urging me to cancel out - "The others would understand, wouldn't they? And just go back to San Francisco as you had planned." But I didn't cancel. Rather I went out and raided a draft board in Little Falls, Minnesota. That was July 10, 1970.
In Minnesota, the few July weeks of summer can be very hot. Beginning with the Spring warmth we had begun planning a coordinated series of raids on rural draft boards. Many tar‑roof heated nights had been spent on top of small business buildings, counting the numbers of people who passed by, the routines of the police cars (marked unmarked), the habits of bar-hoppers and dog walkers. We spent a lot of silent morning hours casing out our particular Board for the quickest way in and out. For this general preparation, I must have visited over 35 Boards around our State. The old green Rambler whined along freeways and county roads, driving me for several days at a time, south and north: east and west; sleeping me on chilly nights in its back seat in corners of railroad parking lots; eating my credit card clean while I gobbled mounds of small‑town buttermilk pancakes and drank pints of mid-western‑weak morning coffee. With our Minneapolis license plates and City-looks we tried to walk and ramble around the semi‑rural towns without looking out of place. At times I'd muddy up its license plates ‑‑ as for myself, I had shaved my beard and cut my long hair some six months back when the draft raiding plans had taken seed. The American‑made car probably didn't catch too many eyes, but I have an birth-scar New Jersey accent, and look like a college professor type, even when I'm naked. Every time I sat down in, or walked around, one of the smaller shopping areas, I felt for sure that everyone knew what I was there for. My early morning headline fantasy was that the local Sheriff was making a breakfast call to the Minneapolis FBI saying, "Yep, Sir, ther'un here yung man you was talking 'bout. Yep, sir, he's 'er having br'kfast at ole Millies. Yep, sir".
Well, I shouted down my Nervous Nelly morning mind and stayed on schedule anyway." After all I told myself, your queasy gut feelings were just the plain ole burglar fears. While on these trips my mind floated over worlds of sufferings and frights like when I climb heights. So I just grit my jaw tight and swallowed forced gulps of morning fresh air. “Look, Kroncke, forget this worrying analytical shit. Just go ahead and do it! Do it!” As the twilight green lawns slide by, my body eased itself and my fingers flipped on some music. Off into another sun and moon of small town boards and a million revisiting “Whys?” Within ten minutes I reached the West Bank and found Mike. He was standing with some friends in a campus dormitory lot. They seemed to know what he was going to do because they kissed him goodbye and hugged him as if he was going overseas or far away. His long, loose blond hair flung around a shooting “Hi, Frank!” greeting smile. He opened the backdoor and threw his bag and the tools for which he was responsible onto the back seat. I kept my sunglasses on, and avoided greeting his friends. He rolled down the window and waved as we started out. Mike and I had taken this drive up north before. For weeks he and I had run through the breaking‑and‑entering motions. Someone from each group had gone to every other board for familiarity and double-checking. For security, we didn’t assign specific boards until the last moments, so everyone had shared some hours together up on the roofs watching the clouds play with the clear summer moon. The moon’s light had told us which windows were best for our entrances. Now we were on the move for real: Highway 10 to Little Falls. Mike seemed meditative, though we both knew that last night was a nervous evening of tossing sleep. Nights‑before always seemed to be like that. A still, monastic quiet washed between us as we spoke more by eyes and smiles, a nervous posture, then broken by a relaxing gush of words. This strange, recurring peacefulness was parted by wandering discussions about the clouds and small town life
Long pauses played themselves between the acid rock beat of popular songs. Funny, how words recede when one is about to act boldly. Mike and I knew what we had to do and while our bodies stealthily readied themselves for the athletic efforts, our minds skipped protectively away from the actual details. We spent an inordinate amount of time amusing ourselves over the car. I had borrowed ‑‑ or snitched (since my Mom was visiting out of state) ‑‑ the family car which was equipped with air conditioning. These July evenings were still hot enough to warrant flipping it on now and then. Imagine! we laughed, going to raid a Draft board in an air‑conditioned Chevy Caprice. "Far out!" what a way to wage guerrilla warfare!
Whatever had started gnawing me back in my apartment began to shoot quivering darts of pain through my neck and the small of my back. “All these years, Kroncke, and you still fear omens, and evil spirits, and bogey men!” The astrology which I had begun to study was obviously hanging some sub‑conscious fears onto my already theologically warped brain. My other mind kept scanning the skies searching for the foretelling pattern of this night. I still can't remember whether I decided that it was a gibbous moon or not. The pale orb was sliced off by the sun in a shape something like the forms in the ying‑yang symbol. At the bottom right the moon was a bloated figure six. The forecasting significance of that moon shape eluded my memory, but what bothered me more was the fast moving black clouds. They gave me the chills: turmoil in the skies, devil veils over the moon! Shudder. "Jesus, what are we doing?" I glanced at Mike. He seemed to glow as mellow as ever. His beard had been cut and his hair trimmed. We looked so young that for a glimpse I was startled. Murky shooting forms began to get their tight grip on me. I shuddered ‑ rippling full body lengths ‑‑ and took some heaving, nerve‑relaxing breaths. "God damn it Mike ‑‑ I'm really nervous." His almost soundless "Yeah" comforted and soothed my jitters. "Nothing like a brotherhood of shared fear," I reflected to myself. Images of a million human faces ‑‑ rainbow's hued faces ‑‑ flew towards me from around the curving, hilly bends of farmed fields. Faces of untold multitudes of the dead ‑‑ "these my body's bones and bloods"‑‑"these my spirit's breaths and nourishments" ‑‑ the peaceful grip of the Struggle wound itself tight around my chest and stomach. I knew that we'd do it no matter what ‑‑ They were calling us forth!
The ride which had begun to seem longer than usual, quickened. "There's the road we'll take on the way back to dump the stuff." It was a county road which one night we found did lead to the Mississippi River. "Good Ole Muddy, we're going to drop all those death‑dealing files into your churning middle, for your patriotic consumption!" Then the highway opened out flat. Little Falls was in sight. As we pulled up to the stoplight I realized that I had gotten somewhat weary just from the waiting. We initiated our first checkout. The simple pattern was to ride around the town a little, running out our standard checks. We passed the Draft Board a few times. Everything looked fairly normal. It was a Friday night and the town was weekend active and bright. Lots of cars were just aimlessly driving up and down the streets ‑‑ young kids whipping in and out of A&W's, faking drag motions, gunning their engines. More noise and activity was coming from the bars, but that was to be expected. Though there were more streetlights on than during a weekday it didn't bother us because the Draft Board was out of the boozing and carousing area. In fact in some ways the weekend clamor would make our faces less obvious. After a time we pulled into a parking lot by "The Hub" cafe down the block from the Board: emergency ‑‑ I had to go urinate! Every time I get keyed‑up, my bladder rains. The cafe john was busy, so I had to idle time standing by the door reading the State's Food Service License & Permit for the kitchen. The waitress walking in and out carrying food automatically eyed me up and down a few times. This night had its strangeness for me but the thing that really got to me was the picture card stillness of the cafe scene. It might have been just me, I'll grant that, but everything seemed to go by in slow motion and unreel itself in 1950's images. Several teenagers were just sitting around, dropping quarters in for jarring music; some were moving in, hustling one another, with a few playing kissy‑face lust Elvis Presley style. The waitress looked like she'd been there forever in her Bus Stop role: dirty black fringed apron and blond hair strands brushing her cheeks. The air was near gasping still, perfumed by a familiar stench ala john doorways. Stretching minutes of this time hung until I heard the flush‑roar, and I awoke from this distraction to take my turn. As I latched the door behind me, an image registered: their collective eye told me that they had never seen me before. Yet, they also verbally passed over me ‑‑ I was just one more out‑of‑town stranger passing by on a Friday night. While in the closet‑like john I caught my second wind. "Pull it together, Francis X," I encouraged myself as my eyes exchanged strengths in mirror‑talk! "This is IT.” As I was reaching for the Hub's door handle something freaky caught my eye. A political pamphlet with the name, in bold lettered type, RICHARD NOLAN. Too much! I went to college with that guy. What a trip, this must be his State congressional district! How's that for the small‑circles‑of-the‑world theory? I sat down and folded the pamphlet out ‑‑ what crossed my mind as the waitress asked, "Do you want some coffee?" was, “Who is the real people's politician? Him or me?" Rick I remembered as an average sort of guy who liked more to guzzle and clown around with women than spend nights burning the studying lights. "If he knew that I was going to do this ‑‑ in his County Seat ‑‑ I wonder what he'd say?” Between the sugar and the salt, I replaced the pamphlet and moved outside to confirm our timing. The question of politics would have to wait my leisure ‑‑ now I had a ritual to enact.
Everything was set ‑‑ Little Falls looked like it did on so many nights before. Waiting times move like snow sludge, so Mike and I decided to go in before midnight. It was 11:10 ‑‑ we settled on 11:30. I drove around town a few more times. To Mike things seemed altogether “normal.” Our plan was to park in back of the Draft Offices. There was a cluster of small stores on the same block and they shared an alley‑like parking lot arrangement. When we had been there before, we felt that no one had seen us. There had been one spooky night though. When we were already up on the Board's roof, an apartment light had gone on directly across from our hiding place ‑‑ about two buildings down. Right back then we thought we’d been had. As a matter of insurance we had been through several mock raids, so if someone was watching us, we felt that they would probably have picked us up before tonight.
The Chevy got parked by a wall. I stepped out and placed the ignition keys behind the front tires on the driver's side. We left our wallets and other personal matters in the car. Together, we quickly moved across the lot ‑‑ with each stride mechanically pulling on our handball gloves ‑‑ and came to a stop by a corner wall. No one seemed to be moving in any part of the lot. The little old lady's bathroom blinds were down. Up went Mike. He pivoted, leaned over to catch the bags. I stepped on the stacked wooden crates: CRACK! ‑‑ they split: "Christ!" my heart began to pound yelling: ”What to do?” My mind reeled a thousand images of curious people rushing to find the source of the noise ‑‑ of cops dropping out from their secret covers ‑‑ and on and on. I wanted to stop. Run back to the safety of the car. Call it off. What a bad omen! But no, quicker than any judgment, I grabbed onto part of the roof's edge and yanked myself up. Mike and I stilled -- looked around ‑‑ bent to a stoop and strode over into the shadows. Each end of the roof had a narrow open view, so we spent more time looking‑out. After our last casing, we had decided to break‑in through the Faulk Insurance office window off the back roof. The window was not only in the shadows but was also protected from view by a column of bricks like those rising from a fireplace. However, for some reason - I think because of his judgment about the noise and the moonlight that night - Mike decided to go in our alternate way. That meant he'd have to belly slide along a small fire‑escape ramp and jimmy open a window. The upped risk was that he could be half‑seen from the side-street walk. However, I guess he felt that the roof gave even more exposure. We didn't have much time to discuss his decision. I trusted Mike's senses. We were a team. If he said go this way, then we went that way. Downstairs from us was a Laundromat and a Bakery. They made a lot of round‑the‑clock noise. That was fine by me. Their noise should cover up our burglaring sounds. So we got the tools out. Mike sat prone and I handed him the tools like a surgeon's nurse: screen cutter ... pry bar ... tape. Mike snake‑twisted around the small platform. I held out other tools from the shadows. He worked fast and, well, soon he was handing me flower pots! A secretary's row of flower pots were in front of the window on the inside. He removed those delicately. We almost giggled. With some brief, swift motions Mike was inside. Now, I had to make my move. I'm six‑foot‑three and it seemed like two hours for me to crawl in. I was sure that someone must have seen my huge feet sticking out like portage canoes! But Mike grabbed my armpits and helped draw me in. It was all done without much noise. Now, we stood in faded light side by side inside one of Uncle Sam's Military Selective Service Boards!
Mike had cased this place from the inside. I hadn't. So he knew that all the files were in the next room. Luckily this waiting room's door to the hall was open. One less window to crack. But the door into the Board Room was locked, as we expected. Much time had gone into our learning how to break a piece of glass without echoes. So we began the scratchings and the taping, followed by the steady heat of a mini‑torch ‑‑ courtesy of Montgomery Wards. Soon the glass began to crack and chip along smooth lines. Using a screw‑driver I jolted loose the triangular piece of glass which hung noiselessly by a piece of yellow tape. Then I guided my left hand through the hole. We had cut the piece close to the door handle side so as to reach the turn‑lock. My forearm was too fat! My fingertips couldn't grasp the knob. So Mike slipped his slenderness through and opened the door. "Ah, how simple! Here we are, you evil spirits. Right now, here, in your sanctuary. Going to steal your sacred files!"
Stepping softly, we moved around through the still heat of the safe‑like room. The brown metal cabinet files with the 1‑A files were locked as anticipated. Within moments I took a screwdriver and placed it in the key slots. “Whap!" This drew out an echoing noise but it should have broken the tumblers. Our ears tried to filter out the clangings of the bakery below ‑‑ and searched for any new sounds. "I think I hear someone in the building," Mike whispered. "No, it's just the bakery," I threw back. "Why don't you start on the Locator Cards, over there in those files," I pointed behind him. Mike moved like a slinking tiger, so silently, with yellow haired aura, and began to fill up his bags. I whacked the cabinet lock again. "Shit!" No luck. A little chilling panic nestled in my neck. I hate for things not to work out the first time around. So I picked up the pry bar, bent the draw’s lip, wedged in by the lock, and heaved away. Strident noises cried up of metal squeakings. But still nothing came loose. From the knapsack I snatched a piece of cloth and put it over the lock's contact point and hammered again. This time the cabinet emitted a low groan. Worse, the damn files were not flush to the wall so it sounded a second "thunk!" as the back rims banged into the side wall. This time Mike palmed my shoulder, he was sure that he heard someone in the building. But I had had those feelings on previous nights, in more dangerous situations, and nothing came of them. Whenever you're under time's pressure, every creak sounds like a wail. Flashes of mangled bodies and atomic mushroom clouds spun from the file drawers. “Jesus, I want those files. Help us get them!” I repeatedly pried the cabinet, my mind lost in a prayerful hunger. Within seconds the whole scene whirled around. My ears caught sounds that were really new human sounds. Heavy footsteps scampering and rushing up creaking wooden stairs. With two jerky, quiet strides I moved towards the door. But before I could do anything, the dark started chanting, “Back away from the door!” “Back away from the door!” A flurry of possible reactions flooded my mind - I was almost close enough to shove the door close. I had added some lighter fluid in case something like this would happen. I wanted those files!! Possible thoughts of just burning the files in their cabinets ....and with that distraction making an attempt to escape by the windows ...hit me, yet the knapsack was across the half-open door. I jumped to the protected side, glanced at Mike, saw some face flesh squat outside in the hallway, heard a kicking‑pounding to the left of us shaking the waiting room door... and behold! one figure crouched dimly in the doorway yelling, “Don’t move... or we’ll kill you!”
All of a sudden the room avalanched - a scurrying of short thoughts trekked across my brain. Something pushed me into the unexpected motions of walking towards the armed men saying, “You have nothing to fear from us and we have nothing to fear from you.” A whole new staging was set. Lights went on. Seven men with bulging gun eyes stared at us. “FBI, you’re under arrest!” And then some smiling guy walks by me and says, “Hello, Mr. Kroncke.” Huh? How does he know my name? I hadn’t told anyone my name! Ah, the mind dizzily reeled and ran instant replays flashing: Ambushed! Ambushed! "Well," I spoke to myself, "This changes everything!"
My telling first thought was, "When will I ever get back to my beloved oceaned San Francisco?" As for Mike he seemed stilled into his characteristic quiet. Shifting gears into this new reality, I began to ramble and chat with our captors. Relief was partially my response when I heard they were FBI. Our group had always feared being caught by some small town super‑patriotic, vigilante types who would shoot first and ask questions later. This was a real dread. After the "Beaver 55" raid {Note: largest draft raid in American history, January 1970, took out 45 centralized rural boards housed in the US Postal Service towers in downtown St. Paul – Hoover sent 100 agents to Minnesota!}the Willmar VFW and American Legion put a $1000 reward on the uncaught raiders' heads. What would they have done if they had caught us? Around the room bulbs popped … tools and bags were being tagged ... a pistol motioned us into spread eagles and began a frisking. "Up against the wall ... and no talking!" Brusque commands and directions bounced between them, and then demanded, "Where's your car? Do you have any identification? You don't have to say anything until you have a lawyer?"... and a whole grape‑cluster of questions and statements. The electric lights shrunk the room smaller than ever – like being inside a cramped wall-safe. Flashes popped over pried bent cabinets ... over the inside of Mike's bag ... over the peaceful lines of our grave/merry faces.
At gunpoint, two Feds finished up with us by handcuffing our arms behind our backs. While these two went to assist the others at their tasks we were shoved outside into a small hallway ...under the trigger eye of a young, gangly cop who answered that he was on the Little Fall’s squad. Sweat ran rivulets off our foreheads. I had to lean over and wipe my forehead and cheeks on Mike’s shoulders, and he chinned and rolled on the back of my shirt. Our damp discomfort was ignored by the Agents, and in time even by our own anxiety/amusement with the situation. We were really caught! Too much! This event which all of us had feared for so long ... which we knew for so long would one day happen ... is happening!
Mike was very, very quiet. He seemed annoyed and closed‑eyed disturbed. Myself, I just swung into my protective hyper‑active babble. I rapped with any FBI agent around. Tried to joke. Act loose and carefree. In fact I grasped the clarity of this bizarre staging. “This is war!” Here I was, on the frontline ... facing the enemy ... the Government held their guns right at my mustache‑less nose! The Gods of War had successfully effected another ambush. “Another body count!” Yet a sobering cloak let its weight fall on my body. “Frank, you’re a theologian. This is where you’re supposed to be. This room ... these walls ... this town: your Call. Isn’t this so? Isn’t this what you’ve been moving towards. Your Task: a Ritual of peace! Bizarre as death ... and birth!”
“What do you think about the war?” Was the probe of all my questions. Here I was - how unreal! Actually face to face with those forces that keep the war going. After all the theology lectures ... all the marches ... all the times alone brooding and thinking in my book heaped study. Here, finally, among the enemy. No: not the Agents as such. “No matter what you feel - don’t hate or fear them. Heal them - and so heal yourself.” Hate the forces they so physically represent: death and the devil. How can I ever share with you how I felt that night? Handcuffed and captured by those other humans who protect the devils dance? Quiet, stoned face humans, who went about their government’s work with such well‑trained Dick Tracy precision. People not taking time to listen to my questions. My spirit paused to trace their patterns practiced so many times before. Flash! - more bulbs startled our eyelids. Crink !‑‑the handcuffs cut into our wrists. Flowing in and out - their every policing detail is drawn: the size, angular description of the rooms, file cabinets, our bag of tools. "They came in through this window, over here in this room." Mark. Write. Paragraph. Sketch. Swarming like busy bees. Professionals of order.
After about twenty buzzing minutes of all this, Mike and I had hit "Phase Two - we relaxed somewhat into the absurdity of it all. Funny, how types of people respond so oppositely to the same thing. The Feds obviously expected that we should be pleading with them ... cowering and being suppliant … rather, as soon as the initial impact of "FBI, you're under arrest!" was absorbed, Mike and I were joking. Talking about the changes clearly in store for us. What we wouldn't be doing. How shocked our friends would be. Wondering about the others at the sister Boards - was the whole group being snared? Was there a rat informer in one of the groups? Yes, our tensions kidded one another. Were afraid for each other. And felt the bonds of brotherhood binding us strong in this frightful situation of capture. Finally, the seven Feds moved us out. From the street the night air hit us cool.
No people nor animals were heard or seen. It was a lake‑calm quiet, Saturday very-early-morning – mid-western, Main Street style, Minnesota. Four marked cars rested by the curbs. Electric streetlights back-dropped a low hum in the refreshing air. One Tweedly‑Dee round Little Falls' Police Chief glided over, peered at us in his best “hard cop” stare, and grunted to the Feds something about, "See you guys next time. Come over for some of that bottle I have." His casual party words seemed to say something else, and for the first time Mike and my eyes shared the assured, tight feeling that the whole group of raiders would be netted up that midnight morning.
The Agents split us between two Government owned cars. Both were the usual non‑descript tan, and had three agents for passage. Agent Ray Williams knocked on my window to tell me that my mother's Chevy had been impounded by the Little Falls' police. For good or bad, several letters which Mike and I had prepared for the local presses lay in that car. These letters spoke of why we were raiding the rural Boards. Now, everything was in the Government's possession. I didn't want to think about what my Mom would say when she came back from her vacation and found her only car under Government lock and key! So I thought of more pleasant things ‑‑like the war! As I leaned back into the seat cushion I unrolled my series of questions ‑‑I earnestly struggled to get them to talk: "What are your ideas about the War? The draft? The Government and organized Crime? Your jobs?" and so forth. They were a strange trio. What they did do on the compassionate human side was to shift the cuffs from behind my back to in front of me. (From the rest, I was told later, that they had to sit with their hands cuffed behind their backs for the long, several hours ride back to the Twin Cities.) These were ordinary men who obviously justified whatever they do by repeating, "It's my job." They were not too friendly with one another. Possibly they hadn't worked together before. Two had southern accents. Possibly they were just tired - or were trained not to talk with prisoners. However, a few times they took off on some topic. Like when I asked the youngest Fed, who was wearing an army‑issue camouflage jacket, about what he thought about Vietnam. Somewhere during his Government‑issued answer he got into a short, mocking, put‑on story about, "Yeah, I guess you'd call this a hunting jacket. Hunting gooks that is." They all laughed loudly and instantly at that. That riff of laughter was all I heard from the other two, but the youngest Fed got turned on about the War and launched into a clipped, serious explanation of how the Vietnamese really love us Americans ... about how good the Pacification Program was. But when I talked about the American‑South Vietnamese assassination program, the "Phoenix Plan," he just clammed up and would not answer me. After about a half hour of this I realized that one of the Feds was taking notes on everything I was saying. That really ticked me off. Annoyed, I quieted down and started counting telephone pole outlines in the moonlight. All in all, it was a dull two hour trip back.
Once back in the Twin Cities, they drove us to the local FBI offices on Fourth and Marquette. Agent Lais slipped in a key and slotted a credit card‑like piece into a slit - and with both in place, the full‑glassed, steel rimmed door yawned - and we were in the elevators. Mike and I were the only non‑civil servants there. So we didn't know whether we were the Government's single prize or not. Needless to say, we certainly hoped we were. The procedure they then put us through was brief and very male. What I mean is that all the Feds had to do was hand and fingerprint us, take a mug‑shot, and fill-out some forms. But each one seemed to pride himself on making every little individual procedure into a big, challenging, macho tangle. While someone was in a backroom tagging our draft raiding tools, tidying up the Locator Cards, and writing out a Federal arrest affidavit, Mike and I were separated into two rooms with three roving agents apiece. Each agent liked to have you jump up when he came in; sit down “there” when he said so; take off your clothes to be searched when he wanted to frisk you for the fourth time; bend over and spread your bottom-cheeks when he said so. And so on. Very, very super‑male. No one offered me coffee. They really didn't want to talk with us. At times my mind snickered “Maybe they don't know how to talk - just grunt one liners." However, I squelched any hostile risings.
The long evening was wearing me down. So, I puppeted around as they ordered. Friendly Agent Ray Williams comes in and takes down a lot of personal data which I was sure the Government already had in some computer bank. Friendly Ray, the quiet, small boned, almost pacifist looking suburban father FBI agent seemed so out of place among the rest. He was trying to be nice, talking softly, affecting concern. He got me some coffee. But after he leaves I'm taken to this old, J. Edgar type tough, who rams our hands into the sticky ink and rolls our palms and fingertips onto paper. Pushing us. Shoving. Almost ready to hit us because we don't want to sit down where he says to sit down.
Macho recycles and instant replays. In the middle of all this stage‑acting my senses were overcome by the repetitious banal office settings. Harsh sterile fluorescent lights. Bland pastel colors on the walls. And too, too many pictures of J. Edgar Hoover ‑‑pictures positioned like shrines to Our Lady of Fatima. All these small repetitious offices which spoke only of efficiency and getting the job done. But then I noticed none of Edgar’s bulldog grinning faces have a name on them - so I ask, "Who's that guy on the wall?" They don’t smile. "How come his picture doesn't have a name? Aren’t you proud of his name?" No Federal answers to the wisecracking. Getting ever more bone tired. And then oh, sweet sounds of the nightingale! comes the less than oceanic pitch of, “Come on you guys, let me alone. Whoopie! here we are,” turning Mike and I to face one another, and quicker than the sunsets on a December night, we smile "Brad!” - and the rest are, for sure, to follow. Almost with relief, and with a strange sense of brotherly togetherness, we are happy to hear them so close and near!
My fingers, with traces of ink reliefing the whorls and ridges, reach out to touch Brad, to speak silent words both in fear and hope. Together with him were Pete and Don, both mutedly sitting inside on a Waiting Room couch. Brad kept striding around, gesturing with cuffed hands, talking, and half‑comically taunting his Feds. His were an even more macho breed of “Special Agents.” Younger men who found it manfully satisfying to push and shove and shout trivial orders at manacled people. One came over and ordered me to sit down. I refused because I felt better leaning against a wall, and he was about to push me into the chair when one of “my” agents came in and asked what was going on. Finally, I sat down until Brad's Agent left. None of us had heard about Bill and Chuck and Cliff and the others. As the place was becoming party crowded the agents decided to move Mike and I out. It was an short drive over to the Hennepin County Jail. Just weeks before I had tried to get into this same Jail, faking my way with a priest's disguise, to see a friend of mine also up on a draft raid arrest.
Now, I was walking in to reside for a spell! It was already late‑early morning and weary exhaustion began to creep into my shoulders and legs for a stay. But before all this was over, we rotated through another processing. This time for the State and County. Aside from all the finger-printing and mugging and meaningless questions cops ask you, one is forcibly struck by the drab, lifeless, smudgy appearance of all these government buildings. Sure, bars in a jail won't ever be attractive. But somehow there’s an air which shoots through these buildings, an air of timeless boredom and drudgery - and pained indifference. The agents and cops don’t seem to enjoy their work in any way. I mean they never seem to relax while together. Sure they drink coffee and have foamed, leather swivel chairs. Yet, the only release for them is to yell or to push or to grunt or to stolidly shoot a cold, sideways glance. FBI Agents, Federal Marshals and the Minneapolis Police - they all seem so terrified, so deeply afraid of something. With guns and cuffs and clubs they can lash out - but they never seem to relax. Interesting.
What a night: within six small morning hours we were headed into our third scene shift. Here we were at 2:30 in the AM walking into a paint‑chipped forest of bars. To be honest my immediate image was how jails always remind me of seminaries. There’s a ghostly quiet common to both, as well as a mechanical orderliness and brusqueness that maybe only Catholics can appreciate. “Ah, the final frisk!” Once more a diligent Officer of the Law takes away our dangerous weapons - this time it is my leather belt! With this last dressing down completed, off they march us, the loose‑trouser criminals, into a cell tier. Not many other residents occupying this section. It's early so the few there snore on, not stopping to greet us. I wander into one of the half yawning steel doored cells. Mike has already hit the sack, "See ya in the morning." I lie down, still too hyped to sleep. With tell-tale noise of key clankings and Brad shouting, in come the rest. Some sleepers curse at them to be quiet. The seven are settling, and somehow in the flickers of summer dawn my body yields to heavy lidded sleep.
The morning’s waking is white, middle‑class unreal. My eyes snap open in reflex to some guard’s harsh yelling about something or someone ... and then a gate clangs, each cell unclangs, people start clambering down iron stairs to the cellblock’s common tier below to gather what our Keeper left. It’s breakfast - or something like that. Soggy buns and weak coffee. Almost smiling, somewhat fatiguely bedazzled, the group mopes and shuffles towards the food. We take a head count. Eight of us. "No new ones." That means that some got away. Great! We gather together to eat. Some small talk. Some just quiet awakenings from hot sips of coffee. Everybody is coming‑to in his own way. Not much talking, but soon the sweet rolls are only crumb tracks, and we’re lounging around in a open cell area, clustered together. "What will we do? Who'll be our lawyers? Do you think there was an informer? Did the rest get away? What will our families and friends think? What type of trial should we have?" The unending, circling and time munching questions begin. Clock time seems to have ceased with a stillness that smells of death. Bill goes off to scrounge for a newspaper. My body is nervously taut and my mind races on and on. The others fade prone. I go to a different cell to be by myself, lie down and coldly tremble. Before much more time doesn’t go by, the eight of us are called down. The guards have decided to move us into another Section. Four go up top on Tier B and four of us are on Tier A. Brad, Mike, Chuck and I are together.
These days we knew would ever be ones of our coming closer together or strain our weaknesses. Mike and Chuck were to play a zillion games of cribbage and some weird word‑game that neither Brad nor I could get into. They spent hours and minutes laughing and playing, having a great time. True to our common natures, Brad and I more or less lolled around analyzing the world and each other, and the rest of the guys. I think that it was during these jail days that I fell in brotherly love with Brad. "Fell in brotherly love" - what a clumsy phrase, but possibly the best one. Because the whole draft raid experience was the first tumble in our mutual falling out of the violent, white, male‑supremacist ideas and ideals of the Establishment into - well, falling out into gentle, non‑violent, manly love: comrades. And how else was it to be for the eight of us except to fall in love with one another? I don’t know what was happening on the upper tier with Bill and Don and Pete and Cliff. We heard that Cliff was frightened out of his mind. The groups couldn't communicate directly, so we used the stretched‑arm note relay system between the barred tiers. As on Tier A, so I intuited, on Tier B four lives were rapidly changing. Objective ideas and personal strengths and weaknesses were sounding their depths and roots. Our talks often rambled around political discussions of Resistance, or about the proper tactics for the upcoming trial - but what was really happening was our silent, hedging dance around the discovery of one another. Here we were, four men who had acted together. Who had risked their lives together. Who had struggled to speak "Peace!" together. Together. Clearly, what we were seeking was to be together. To live intensely together. We were ourselves as equally symbol and reality of the human truth and intimate peace which stood as the goal of the draft raids. And here we were, together, in jail - and it was okay.
While in the Hennepin County Jail none of us had ripened to that moment of frankness in which we could speak of this passion. That was to come later. What we felt then was that no bars could contain any nor all of us. That whatever the Government had up its sleeve, whatever the Department of Justice could do to us ‑‑they couldn’t take away or destroy this daybreak newness that we had experienced by acting in a human, moral and truth‑rendering way. Our Resistance had alloyed us brothers - bonded in the fire dark reaches of our spirits. In between my chills and sweaty July tremblings, my queasy gut and my creeping goose-bump fright, I relished this joy of having lived, with these others, for Peace. Up to the steel lid ceiling I reached to mark my passing with vision eyes.
The eight of us were to count six days in that jail. Looking back within the whole struggle of the trials these first days flit by like a zipping flash. Yet I know that they crept along with a still breath. But a moment's reflection and I instantly recall the stank of a piss‑soaked, hot and humid, bug infested July county jail day slithering all over me. What body can forget those tiny cells, with four sets of iron bars between them and the corridor ‑‑the corridor where four TV stations were positioned, turned on, usually to the same stations ...blaring forever throughout the tiers which caught little natural light. My outside electric bulb was burnt out for four days and the guards continually refused to notice it. I had a twilight, gloom room all day long. The other inmates (some who had been there almost a full year: waiting for trial) said that the two tiers held 63 men.
Each tier had one shower: plugged up and flooding back ...one razor blade in the morning and a small, Holiday Motel size bar of soap with which to wash and shave some 30 odd men. Three times a day we lined up, leaning against the bars, to get some plastic tray food: always soggy, overcooked stuff... full of fatty grits. If anyone wanted snacks or some small luxury like a comb, we'd have to jostle with the black inmate who ran the commissary. In between readings of fourth class pulp novels ‑‑the sparse reading matter "Permitted" on the tiers ‑‑each of the eight tried to strike up conversations with the other prisoners.
There was a lot of fine rapping but, as expected, we had trouble being accepted by the others. There were class differences, e.g., with a white guy who faced 40 years for smuggling guns. Racial differences with blacks who looked upon us as the weirdest white birds they'd seen yet. And sad times talking with a kid in there for trying to burn down a Draft Board. His leg was heavily burned. His fidgety eyes conveyed themselves as very paranoid. Unfortunately he was a little turned around in his head: he did the draft raid action after some heavy drinking. One time he even tried to trade off his food because he felt that the guards had poisoned it. Of course, he received no special treatment or arrangement. The several who had obvious medical or mental problems were just lumped in with the rest of us. Rainbow people with throbbing colors of pain and pulsing wave rhythms of yearning heartbeats.
Yes, those days crept by ‑‑ but with intensity. Each second was full of some life grappling encounter, some mystery ‑‑ of myself or someone else. As I looked at the faces I knew: here was a criminal ...caught and caged... never would he be the same. I gleaned a lot. Yes, the sociologists are right. They'd be glad to have my experienced confirmation of their academic observations: the others were mostly black, and all poor. Very few, however, grasped the political nature of their being in prison. Most just wanted to get "outside" and try once again to beat out the next guy for the Buck. As for me, early on my first day I had walked into my cell, raised my arms toward heaven, and said, "Is this what You really want?" Needless, to say I didn't receive any special treatment, either!
As I look back now, I know that I had answered my Call. All my life the mid‑afternoon Voice was murmuring “Outlaw!” This now my ears heard plainly. Born in these murderous times my role is not to learn nor preach from the lectern and the pulpit... it is to wrap tight fingers around cold iron, cage bars and say, "This is my Body!" That is what I was then just beginning to understand. Anxiety comes to doubt my comfort. Chills and tremblings play demonic laughter upon my spirit's body. Nights break me and I shudder. Insight is its own preparation!
.2.
The FBI pulled off their ambushes on a Friday evening‑Saturday morning. By Saturday evening the TV news had an interview on with some people called, "The Committee to Defend the Eight." Amazing! I had used my one telephone call to contact Karen, but our group had not intended to get caught, nor to give ourselves up on the spot ‑‑so we had not spent any time organizing a Defense Committee. Much to our surprise, then, here in the middle of summer, the Resistance community had immediately come to our support. Charlie and Pauline Sullivan, a former priest and nun, spearheaded the formation of the Committee. This moved us deeply because we were sure that most of the local Resisters did not know who we all were. Bill and Don were well known on campus, but in the main we were just one among many campus activists. More, for the next three days and nights there were large rallies held outside the courthouse building. Over 500 people protested in the streets, the Minneapolis Tribune said.
On one night the Tactical Squad rioted‑‑went crashing through the crowds, banging heads, and arresting people at random. A woman had broken a courthouse window with a flag staff. All this police frenzy brought the righteous liberals out of the woodwork. Remember this was the hot summer following Cambodia ...Kent State ...Jackson State... and nation‑wide draft office raids. Minneapolis, like so many cities, was simmer to boil. When the cops came down, the people rose up! Even more people came into the streets when they heard that the eight of us had been formally arrested on the charge "Sabotage of National defense materials” ‑ and were handed a $50,000 bail bond apiece. Wow! I was the first to hear District Attorney Renner state that bond price. Ransom!
First to hear him level the charge that we were part of a sinister, national plot (he almost said "international Roman Catholic plot") of draft raiders, ala the Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, who were “intending to overthrow the Government.”
It was Nazi weird. I had called in a young, poverty lawyer friend, Roger Haydock, to represent us at this Bail Hearing. His eyes almost popped out like toast, and he listed slightly, when he felt the price of Bail. The legal overkill almost made me giddy with laughter: "Sabotage!" and “$50,000 apiece!” What was really going on? I couldn't believe the DA's conspiracy story about who we were. Yet another strange setting, another illusion ‑‑was carefully being prepared for us by the Government. Now the eight were to play the roles of saboteurs. This was so heavy, that it was merry. Think of my inflated self‑image ‑‑ earnest young Roman Catholic theologian becoming a Government saboteur. After all! all I was doing was effecting a socio‑political sacramental act. Wouldn't any other common‑sense theologian do the same? Yet in a spiritual fashion, the Government was right. Our symbolic raids were intended to sabotage the demonic powers of War. Clearly, those threatened often understand the true powers of their attackers. The immoral understand morality. The evil see good. Warriors know their true enemies, the peaceful. So, now, we were to stand before our fellow country-folk as saboteurs. Spiritual, moral, non‑violent saboteurs ‑‑ it was almost a too generous patriotic compliment.
To give you some hilltop perspective on what type of change all this demanded of each of us, let me talk with you about who the eight of us are.
Let's see: the people on the outside knew that the press was calling us, "The Minnesota Eight." Some knew Bill Tilton, Don Olson, and Chuck Turchick. The younger ones probably knew about Pete Simmons. Mike, Brad, Cliff and myself were not too well known. I had hardly spent anytime directly involving myself in local Resistance activities. The bulk of my two years in Minneapolis was spent working and preaching at the University's Roman Catholic Newman Center. However, the DA and the FBI seemingly had their own special ideas about who we were. Some Agents gleefully passed the remark to Brad when he was handcuffed: "Guess we got some Beavers now!" This referred to the February 1970 raids in Minneapolis‑St. Paul of the "Beaver 55." This draft raid
group pulled off the largest, single guerrilla mission against the Draft System in the country.
The Beavers gnawed and demolished 45 rural boards in one night – these were administratively centralized - including the State Selective Service Office! This anti‑war orgy was held in both metropolitan downtown areas, under the sniffing noses of security guards who watched the buildings 24 hours a day! A real coup for the Resistance. No one was caught, even to this day. Brad and Chuck along with two women “surfaced” to the public on the University of Minnesota campus and claimed political and moral responsibility'' for the act. Within a month I had joined their Defense Committee, and went on speaking tours with them So, it seems that the Feds felt they had ground upon which to count us as part of a nasty ring of marauding draft raiders. But then the Government also felt that we were linked with the East Coast Berrigans. I wish we had been! Sometimes I wish the Governments fantasies were reality! There was a striking similarity in the names of draft raiding teams. For example, our letters to the editors explaining the purpose and meaning of our symbolic draft raids were signed, "The Minnesota Conspiracy to Save Lives.” This bore a poetic likeness to another group called, "The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives." Surprisingly, the Feds didn't say much about that coincidence.
When the daily papers hit the sidewalks on Monday morning the front page headlined: "Families, Friends Call 8 in Draft Raid Idealist." For almost all of the following two years, up to the time for Federal imprisonment, this was to be the only, favorable and personality oriented article to be printed. Molly Ivins, a young reporter who had leanings to the Left, had scooped our story because she knew better than us that the newspaper’s prejudices and fears would eventually do our image in. So she rushed some hastily drawn but fairly accurate biographies to the front page. On that morning Twin Citians heard of us as we are: young men, sons of the Establishment, with impeccable, middle‑class, white, Judaeo-Christian backgrounds. Young men whose minds and hearts are torn apart by the Vietnam War. Young people who had been active on the University campus, in church gatherings, in draft counseling centers, as conscientious objectors, as writers ‑‑in protest against the War which we judge immoral and insane.
The portraits Molly drew were boldly sympathetic. Needless to say the eight of us were shocked and happy to see this favorable image drawn. Beginning that evening, however, on every nightly news broadcast we were to hear ourselves continually labeled as "mindless vandals" and “misguided young men.” While the Letters to the Editors, received by one local paper, were the largest volume ever received (and running in our favor), still there were printed Letters of citizens outraged at our "violent" acts. They voiced a call for a public hanging of us as traitors. The $50,000 bail didn't help our public image either. The Government knew that ‑‑ the high bail was the first of many Government moves to create our image and control the public's understanding of us. Consider that bank robbers and murderer would feel that a $30,000 bail would be very high. Here we were, as everyone knew, first‑offenders and already being slapped with one of the highest bails ever (at that time) given to white radicals.
How would the public learn? "Well if they weren't traitors why would the Government have given them such a bail?" In general, the press editorials and TV commentators pushed Molly Ivins' portraits out of view. They pulled in their willfully uninformed generalizations of us as common thieves. To this day, most Minnesotans do not know who “The Minnesota Eight” are, because all they received through the media were abstract, lifeless descriptions of us as eight young vandals, (Note that by 1972 there was a turn around in public opinion wherein one Minneapolis Tribune editorial asked, "Where in History for the Minnesota8?")
No media ever spent its time getting our story as we tell it. After all, we claimed that the breaking and entering act involved in raiding the Draft Board was practically irrelevant ‑‑ our task was to raise a symbolic protest of the War. But then that might have lead the readers and viewers to question ... to ask probing questions about “Why did they do it this way?”... to possibly take the time to come to our trials to find out what was going on between the young and the Government. However, the media shirked their moral responsibility and acted towards us in a fashion which all powerless people know to be their common fate. The media folk moved along with a uniformity of unconcern and misinformation that almost smacks of a conspiracy to deceive the public. They faithful treated us more as common thieves than as political dissenters. Possibly we threatened the power base of their corporate media economies?
Never did an Establishment interviewer ever sit down to discuss the meaning, purpose and historical traditions behind our symbolic moral and political acts. To even spend 15 minutes listening to the crucial, human significance of our life struggles from Establishment kids to non‑violent activist patriots. With all that had been going on in those boiling years of ‘69 and ‘70 ‑‑ all the protesting and Government murders of students and black militants ...all the human heat and passion ...all the publicity and national controversy over the draft raids of the Berrigans and others like the nearby “Milwaukee 14”... all this, which the Minneapolis presses and stations knew about... all this and what do we get but a TV blackout and practical press censorship. I guess the constitutional right to free speech never said anything as to the right to free press, did it? So to answer, “Who are the Minnesota 8?,” you’d have to understand that most Minnesotans and Twin Citians cannot answer that with any degree of accuracy. It is as difficult for you to find out who we are as it is for you to receive the truth about the Government reasons for the Indochinese War!
The best and most honest answer to the question is to say ‑‑ we are eight young men who were not allowed to speak to our people about a most serious and criminal matter: the Vietnam War. That best characterizes what happened throughout our whole experience within the courts and on the outside. Our local, Establishment powers sided with the Washington Government in making us "The Mute 8." Like legions of other Sixties youths who went into the streets pleading with the Powerful to end the war, we of the Minnesota 8 were not listened to ‑‑even in our home towns. We were brusquely shunted off to the side, and finally caged up ...dragged out of touch, eyesight and earhearing of our fellow Americans. Our story is just one more serial in the ongoing Government Saga of turning the morally dissenting, protesting Americans into Mutes: we are the patriot children of the Mute Sixties.
I don't want to mislead you. We did speak words ‑‑ lot of words, in person and through mimeoed leaflets, all over our State. Furthermore as Resisters understand communication, we spoke with an undying, unmuffable voice by our bodily actions: our truth dance. No press nor TV image can capture or convey more intensely the truth of what we spoke to the world through our actions. This you must understand well. I recount our story here on paper to give another dimension to our truth‑rendering dance. On the human scale of communications, good actions ‑‑peaceable, loving actions ‑‑speak to and through the times in a lasting, non‑erasable way that yesterday's newsprint cannot. Resisters go to our people for truth and peace ‑‑ not to black imaged words on yellowing pages. Yet there is a fairness to the diversity of life and to the peoples search for clarity that news reporters seem to violate.
In my partial complaint I am just raising, once again, the lament of the workaday, powerless person who experience the misuse of the media ... and at times it's just too much, especially when the sanity of the world rest on the times. One of the reasons we Americans are sunk in Indochina is because the media keeps us distracted from the human issues of the war and leads us to believe that only the Government has the moral right to make foreign policy decisions. Our draft raid actions were typical of so many people's drive to speak about the human dimension of the war ... to speak ... or raise a cry... for morality and sanity ... and the recapture of power by the people. Like the Universal Soldier who gets crushed by every rich man's war ‑‑ we Americans only read of the Generals and the Presidents, of the strategies and the tactics of the Powerful. It seems that the task of the people's patriots will never be publicly reported ‑‑ nor sung ‑‑ to their own generation, to their own neighbors ‑‑ if the Government and its media continues to have its power elite way. But many of us will sing of the nobility and courage of the common folk who build and struggle America's growth. And when the times come for us to accuse the Government of war crimes ‑ against the Indochinese and all Americans ‑ then we will fearlessly stand up and speak boldly. We acted, act, and will act because we believe in one another ‑‑ as a people we know and trust our spirit and our common sense morality. When the Powerful refuse to give us a public hearing, than we will ‑‑as we do walk person to person, door to door, to knock and speak the truth.
To understand us, you must know that we are eight young people who feel that each person speaks more loudly and humanly through their personal actions than their vocal words. To understand who we are, you have to understand that twist. We have heard hundreds of our friends and family members say, "I don't like war. I don’t like to kill. Yet we have watched them go off to war and off to kill or spend their lives working for and supporting institutions and industries feeding the Death Machine. We felt deeply to our heartbeats that the body must be the vehicle for the truth of words. To dislike war means not to got! To dislike killing, means not to kill!
For the eight of us, Resistance is a way of a patriotic speaking. We are people who believe that structures and institutions can speak in a bodily fashion. When Mike and I went into that Board to steal those files, we saw ourselves as robbing the System of its ability to say, "Kill! War!" The 1‑A files are the vocal chords of the Vietnam War. The 1‑A files speak to a young man – “Your time has come. Go forth and kill!" So in stopping the Draft System we believe that we are speaking back to the System. Resisters are saying, “Be quiet! Cease!”
Despite the friendliness and mild mannerisms of the Draft System’s personnel, we know that the System itself is evil. The 8 are persons who see a difference between property and people. We believe that we can speak back to property through “property”. When I took the files from the cabinet I was saying, “Stop all this senseless killing!” to the System. With equal voice Mike and I were speaking to those who tend and nurture the System, pleading with them, "You who build the altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it anymore!" In a further effort to communicate our moral values to the Draft servants we geared our actions so that no one would get hurt. After all we could have fire bombed the Boards, or shot the State Director, or ran in during the day time, gag the Clerk and ripped off the files. Rather, we wanted to speak non‑violently. Therefore, we selected out just the 1-A files. Snuck in at night. Had letters prepared to explain the meaning of our actions. And planned everything so as to minimize fear and destruction.
In many ways then we Resisters are a strange people. Criminal, I guess that's right, but Peace criminals. People who break laws which sanction total war, massacres, and uncontrolled violences. People who try to speak through verbal words and symbolic acts. To understand us, you'd have to ask yourself whether you'd do what we did. Do you understand, and would you do, a symbolic act? An act without personal gain either for money or prestige. An act, like a stage play ‑‑ guerrilla theater ‑‑ which tries to speak through human rituals as well as through words? In short, we are non‑violent patriotic people who try to speak Truth to Power. And this is why the Government acted so repressively. Why it tries to smash us. After all, as even the unfavorable news articles showed, we eight were not politically nor financially powerful. We had nothing to gain from stealing the records ‑‑ there is no Syndicate "fence" for draft files! Yet ours is a dangerous, Government threatening act. We dared to vent our moral outrage!
To point up the deceptions and the contradictions of illegitimate Government. Resisters are an embarrassment ‑‑ children within the Family challenging the Father's iron‑hand Rule. For such a crime the fearful Government came down with a ransom‑like bail and a wild‑eyed charge of Sabotage: 10 years in prison! Should we not think then that the Powerful thought us too powerful in some way? What is that way? That we speak ‑ that we try to give moral witness both in actions and words? Is that it? Wherein lies our power? Is breaking and entering a rural draft board equal to national sabotage? Yes, I can only surmise it is: the sabotage of breaking‑and‑entering into the moral soul and patriotic spirit of the people! After all the Government must fear the morality and patriotic strength of the people or why have the Powerful had to lie to us people about the War through five Administrations? Isn’t that the real story behind the "Pentagon Papers”? That the Government knows the moral sensibility and power of the people? Yes, peace criminals must be powerful ... we must be people who have something which the Government wants to either stifle or destroy. Gathering a lesson from them in this negative way, we can see that the Government is telling us what the actual situation in this country is. It is afraid of speaking truth to the people. It is afraid of us who come from the people, speaking their moral outrage. For, who can know, the people might see, hear, feel ... and then rise up angry!
While we sat in that jail, these seeds within our spirits were bursting forth roots, the tendrils of a gentle flowering sinking into the rich soil of a people's spirit ... once planted, to gently unfold its beauty. Yet, we eight really didn’t know who we were, or who we were to become. We had hunches about ourselves, but too much within ourselves and our lives was the this life moving growth. In many ways this rapid rise of sap left us unable to clearly draw this picture which I now see. Back then we pulsated scared. Had doubts about the worth of our risk. We feared and hoped, as all people do who are caged.
As I sat back against my cold, steel wall pillow, I reflected, as I often did in open late afternoon spaces about how we got together ‑‑ what drove us or threw us together? As to time, we had gotten together over a mixture of months, drawn by the gentle, global lure of Peace. Our was a feminine attraction. From the hard shells of our super‑masculine young adulthoods, spirits were being sprung by the eternal touches of Peace’s spring tenderness. All that we knew as we looked at one another, each with their own eye's time, is that we wanted to be peaceful and non‑violent people. Who wanted to be able to sing and dance, love and be free ‑‑without being embarrassed. As a group we weren't very physical then. Mostly we expressed our yearning in words. We had yet to learn how to comfort one another. All of us had come from conservative families; most had been rigorously disciplined on Christian morality and fears. So each step we took away from our past was actually a yank forward with piercing pains and tremblings. What we read about ourselves in the papers and heard on the TV was all our distant pasts. How little the world knew that we were cosmic seeds germinating. Our friends outside the jail, marching around, chanting and holding vigils‑they sensed this. "They’re on the inside for us. We’re on the outside for them." That was the oft‑shouted speaker's motto. How true, we were inside. Inside the Belly of the Monster. Inside the Womb of Peace. Inside Our Barred Manhoods. Inside the act of creative loving. Inside: foetal people –future babies of the global village tribe ‑ children of the Dark seeking rebirth into the Light.
You should expect me to say that we all took this time with different colors. If the others would read what I'm writing they'd say to you, “Yeah, that's Franks way of putting it.” Those others (five who are already in prison as I write this) once again they are changing. Once again within a womb ‑‑ steel barred ‑‑ their 5 year gestation period ‑‑to be limbed and faced with a new Body and souled with a New Spirit. This time I may not be with them physically. Each of them is presently in five separate Federal prisons. Possibly when they get out, when we all get out, we will read my words and say, “That's not how it was.” Possibly, we'll all forget. And, possibly, we'll even remember it better than I have now. At least now, my brothers, let me speak of you to those who read our story.
In previous rough drafts I've hesitated from drawing sketches of my brothers. I know that what I will image is too severely limited by my uneven friendships with all of them.
Many who have found the eight of us in a room holding a political or organizational discussion have been moved to remark, "How did you guys ever pull anything off together?" Yes, our temperaments vary like the seasons Yet we share a common‑life desire to be truthful to peace, to listen to others, and to act. So in presenting ourselves to you, I do so briefly and with full awareness that our presences are filtered through my modes of experiencing and expressing each of us. But you should have a taste of our human flavors. With even my limited efforts, what happens in the following chapters will make more sense to you.
Bill Tilton is your type of friend who is forever standing by a microphone. His earthly task, I presume, is to speak to the world about itself. I first saw Bill during a rally in front of Coffman Hall on the University of Minnesota campus. Bill was then Vice President of the student body. In that capacity he was a student you read about almost everyday in the student paper, the Minnesota Daily. His picture was in almost every issue since it was the years of campus turmoil, and Bill was an anti‑war activist. For me Bill images forth sights of huge crowds and him rising on a podium to speak. Possibly someday he'll be an orator, in the romantic sense that my high school history books gave me for that term when describing William Jennings Bryan. Often the press describes Bill as having charisma. He never struck me that way. To me he is a bright fellow, from a slightly richer middle class family, who likes to talk on and on. He's the only person I personally know who thrives on meetings. Always I think of Bill as the politician. The type of person who could stand all the handshaking and baby‑kissing and endless debates over political trivia. Some will tell you that he's tall, over six foot, dark haired, handsome and popular. I'll tell you that he has eyes. Always his eyes are speaking to me, usually something like, "Aw, c'mon Frank you don't believe that bullshit!"
"That bullshit" refers to my super‑theological analysis of life and politics. Bill himself spent some time in a Christian Brother's seminary, and years in the Catholic faith ‑‑ but he doesn't relate to that now. It took me many months to reach in and touch his tenderness. Yet I'm not quite sure that I do know him. He has a way with his eyes of keeping me in my "other" world. But if you're in a group with him you’ll remember his crackling laugh and his smoker’s cough. He smokes a lot ... and hacks a lot. Bill’s eager to do things ‑‑ got real impatient waiting to go to the Federal prison. Like most of us he always has to have something to do, and he gets himself overextended.
For example, when we were planning the raids he’d casually drop into our meetings just long enough to pick up on the latest “facts” and then scoot out to another meeting. The draft raid was just one more thing on his monthly schedule of activities! When we sit down to talk about our bonds of brotherhood, Bill doesn’t like to spend much time on poetic or spiritual type discussions. He is quite practical, fearless, and always ready to defend what he believes is right, and to help out people who cannot articulate their own feelings. Bill was, and is, the best known of the Eight in the Minneapolis community. People respect him and listen when he talks. He takes criticism fairly well, though he is inclined to brush off negative remarks at first, preferring to let them sink in slowly in a less painful way. Yet self‑critical he is. Bill is always ready with a mountain of words. His mind hops quickly. When in court, he kept hammering back with hard, cutting words at the judge and prosecutor's every word and action. Bill’s the type of guy who rushes into something while the rest of us wait on the porch! You like to have him around, because he keeps you off guard and is always moving out into some lively, spirited action.
Don Olson and Bill have known each other for many campus years. Don started out – of note?! - as the President of the University fraternity Zeta Psi. He was active in conservative politics, as evidenced by his active support of Barry Goldwater’s presidency and his work in the 1966 "Conservative‑Liberals Against the War." When I first met Don his patriarchal beard was about nine inches long. He has sandy, somewhat curly hair. Her’ fair skinned and stretches to what one might call gangly, though he isn't Ichabod Crane tall. When we were doing the raids he looked more like Rip Van Winkle. He was the only one not to shave for the actions. In fact Don let his hair grow longer ‑‑ almost halfway down his back. In some ways, maybe that gives him away. He's the type of person who likes to wear long, long hair. While for some, beards indicate wild‑eyed Rasputin type revolutionaries, Don is the quiet, gently‑stroking‑his‑beard, type anarchist. Without any bones about it, Don talks about the ideals of an anarchist society, meaning one of voluntary, free association.
Wherever you meet him, Don seems always to have a copy of the British magazine Anarchos under his arm. He comes from a poor working‑class family. His mother couldn't afford to come from out of state to the trials, and will have difficulties affording the price of travel to visit him in prison. For years he’s been draped by a baggy, blue, knee length overcoat; probably rescued from Goodwill or the West Bank’s Free Store. But inside and under all that hair lies a brilliant mind. When in graduate school Don had plans to serve in the State Department. But, like so many of us Sixties-Kids, the dark evils of the Vietnam war broke life shattering thunder over our heads. So strolling from the far right of America comes Don Olson. From Goldwater he worked through the years in Draft counseling, Students Against Selective Service (SASS), Twin Cities Draft Information Center, going into draft Resistance by refusing induction, and ending up behind bars with seven other assorted odds and ends of the Nations youth.
When the group is together, often people like Brad, Bill and myself talk the others into overwrought silence. Don is so careful and patient, that he will not push his way into any conversation. He handles people as if they were fragile Dresden chinaware. All through the months of trials and after, he seemed to be quietly receiving and mulling over all the events. Don’s an exacting observer whose mind cuts quickly to the core of an event or idea. But most of all he’s just a really fine and funny guy. Almost soundlessly funny as the quiet people are. In entering a room he might lurch in from behind a door panel, slither around in his long coat, turning as if under a Dracula’s cap to bare his long, fangs: plastic, fake teeth which he even brought into the courtroom!
In his own way a Yippie - putting a comic mood on the most serious of matters. When Don speaks it is with a historical knowledge that would have done our Government well. However, Don could never work for a Government with an unfree, undemocratic, involuntary Draft system. Because, for Don, all aspects of growing and living must be freely chosen. Furthermore, he lives to see people being good to one another. I wish that I knew him better. Too often his patient temperament has let people like me ramble in words, and the sad result is that we ramble right by the heart of the person we are trying to reach. However, maybe Don is waiting for the right time to speak. Some future time when he will judge that I am comfortable and open to listening. He’s like that. Quiet, gentle, with a power for feeling that I deeply respect. Our country needs people in the State Department who carry false fangs with them. Serious people who can laugh. Possibly, Don is the most patriotic of us all - because he listens to others, and he gives you space to be yourself.
Pete Simmons has a lot of Don’s gentleness. Pete was the youngest of our group at 19; Don the oldest at 27. Yet Pete wears the same type of quiet, non‑violent earnestness about life. His interest lays primarily with conservation. That's not too surprising for a Resister. Pete's liking to care for the land and for animals fits in logically with his pacifistic demonstration against war. I've looked at Pete often and wondered how someone as young as he had gotten so much stuff together in his head about war and politics. Editorials, when attacking us, always mentioned that we were all bright, above average, and such stuff. With Pete that was even more obvious. He's somewhat precocious, in a good sense. When he's with his mother Mary and brother David, you can sense the depth of compassion and feeling he has. It confused me at times. “Pete’s just a kid,” I'd often say to myself, yet he's a well of humanness.
I guess that I can't help describing the guys in comparisons to myself. It took me, and is taking me, many more years to get where I am than it is obviously taking Pete. Gandhi influenced him and so did the Bible. Yet neither Peter nor his family is very religious. Unlike myself, I guess, he just picked all this non‑violence up intuitively. He didn't have to trek the tortuous, rationalistic paths that so many of us did. He just grew into a gentle family which asked him what he thought ‑‑ and so he thought and came out determined to live what he thought to be truth.
Going to prison bothers Pete. He abhors physical violence, and since he's fair‑haired, strikingly gentle and slightly passive, he expressed a lot of fear about being beaten up or attacked sexually. During the last days of freedom I noticed fright in his lake blue eyes. They signaled an awareness that he had bitten off a pretty big piece of life. As I watched Pete I felt a greater pang of confusion and suffering seep from his arms than from any others of us. While he’s so strong and fearless in many ways, there is a youthful burden of disillusion which bites someone like Pete with a cynicism and a despair lost on time’s hardened spirits. Don’t mistake me, he had no hesitations about the draft raid. The trials he took in stride and with much wisdom. Yet he still wanted to continue serving his people. “What good would it do putting me in jail? To sit idly for five years?”
Pete still wants to go to Law School. Still he desires to follow up on the ecology interests. Still he wants to celebrate his young manhood with his friends and family. However, the gentle who rise up must go to prison! At 20 he walked into the barred cages. He felt the heaviness of an uncertain future with a regretful sense. The younger one is, the easier it is to regret certain steps. As the years go on, one settles into accepting that he or she is the person who did such and such, and didn’t do such and such. With Pete, with all the opportunities the future held for him, at times he seemed to wish the draft raid away. Wave it away like a bad dream. However, Pete is that caliber of person whose deepness grows solid walls of support as experiences nourish him. Of all of us, because of his age, Pete might be the one to benefit most from the draft actions.
In this little series of gentle, quiet people - excluding waterfall rumbling Bill Tilton - comes Chuck Turchick. Now as I write about my brothers, I seem to be in an emotional bind in my attempts to describe them to you. I find myself saying that they are all fine fellows, really bright, had great opportunities in front of them, and so forth.
Sounds a little circularly monotonous, and possibly a little too nice. However, in some ways we all seem to be quite alike. As Resisters we’re all committed to non‑violence and to acting out our beliefs. Like Chuck’s Phi Betta Kappa, we’ve all been academically honored and proficient. If you met the group of us you’d put us into general categories like quiet and talky, or slappy and gentle, but you wouldn’t find us as uncommon folk. When I imagine specific differences, I think of Chuck as radar. He’s very short - and quite sensitive about what he calls “Height chauvinism.” Yet his body moves like a radar net just taking in facts, feelings, data and analyzing them on the spot. With all that stored knowledge he remains a closemouthed person. Speaks sparingly, but always with precision. He has the driest, quickest humor on the face of the earth. Yet at times this son of a Torah teacher is almost a Yippie, slipping into an antic, saying, “Lets do that” and when someone says that “That is bad,” he’ll shout back, “Like I said lets not do that!” Quick ... so quick are his reflexes and humor that you have to catch up with your laughter.
Not surprising then, he’s also a ping‑pong (or, as he’d want it said, “table tennis’) champion. When we’d go around to talk at colleges, if the students didn’t react or were kind of low‑keyed we’d try to get Chuck into a match with the local ping‑pong champion. That would sure draw people! And of course we’d always win. Chuck carries his paddle with him wherever he goes in - a leather case! Just recently during the prison championships at El Reno, Chuck won ping‑pong, dominoes and several other tournaments to get a trophy for the most 1st places. Quite characteristic of Chuck is the following prison incident.
While at E1 Reno a guard challenged him to a typing contest. This guard has a standing challenge with the inmates. The prize is the sweeping and mopping of a 100 foot square area. Of course, the guard has always won. I'm sure that he wouldn't have risked it otherwise. However, in comes Chuck. All 4' 11' of him – easy target, eh? So tap‑tap‑tap goes the keys and Chuck wins! The inmates went wild and Chuck was an instant hero. In his letter home, Chuck closed off this heroic incident by "But when the dust settled and the sun went down in El Reno ‑‑ once again ... he was still the guard ... and I still was the lowly prisoner!" With such a sighful approach, does Chuck take life. With like quick wit Chuck picks upon small irregularities or slips of the tongue which pass by most people. Through them he gently expresses his pacifistic compassion. At his Sentencing this by‑the‑by scenario revealed both Chuck's humor and his sentiments about prisons. Devitt: “Thank you, Mr. Turchick, for your comments and for representing these individuals.” Chuck: “I am Turchick. He is Tilsen. That's so he doesn't get sentenced!"
“Will Mike Therriault ever make it through prison without Chuck Turchick?" That's a question I often ask myself. After those six days of infinitely numbered games of cribbage brotherhood, I don't see how either one can handle prison without the other. Together they would actually enjoy prison, of that I'm sure. In line with the others, excluding Bill again, Mike is the quiet type. He cut off his beard for the actions, but has grown it back since ... having long, blondish hair, a fair person like Pete and Don. Though I worked with Mike, I didn't get close to him during the pre‑Raid period; nor in many ways have I at this time. We share a common Roman Catholic background, yet he seems to be motivated by something different than the rest of us. Sure Mike grew from the non‑violent, pacifist tradition. But he seems to burn inside. A slow, ember‑like smolder that at times glows forth ‑‑ or rages forth as it did at the time of his Sentencing speech. His studies at the University were in psychology, but what seemed to have affected him the most was something similar to Don's Common‑Sense obsession ‑‑ that people should be free to choose. Ironic, isn't it, that these people driven by the desire to build a world around free choice have to spend their years in unfree prisons!
At times I sensed that Mike was very intensely motivated by the fact of belonging to a large family. He wanted to offer them, specifically his younger brothers, a chance to freely choose whether to go to war or not. Mike also comes from a working‑class background. In his family Mike was one of the first to seek higher education. Typical of the life for a rising young Catholic working class man he even spent some time in a local seminary, Nazareth Hall. When I’m with Mike I don’t always feel comfortable because in a way his quietness is a suction, a vacuum. His eyes sort of drag you near him. Somehow - how can I phrase it? - his quietness is like a deep natural well. When you meet Mike you feel a cool luring draft grappling your limbs and you move almost fearfully as one does when they approach the rim of an open well and lean over to peer in. During our trial he sat there, almost wordless throughout the whole affair, yet every one could sense the whirlwind churning through his eyes and body. What’s brewing? He’s even given to states that he is no longer non‑violent!
During the last several months he has been studying organic farming - what he wants to do when he gets out of prison. Mike is often more set in his opinions than the rest of us. Hmmm, it’s strange in a way that I’d say that, considering the lot of us! But he seems to take criticisms too brittlely, and he doesn’t like to be hassled - things seem to hassle him easily. I half expected him to split the country before the end of the trial. But he remained. Mike’s the type of person who can brood; can be described at times as sullen. Yet his closest friends are happy‑go‑lucky Yippies. The commune he lives in, “Wellington House,” is best described as a circus. A wild, happy, weird place that is the fringe - electric, eclectic, fringe of the movement. People find Mike easy to get along with. I found him very friendly and calm to work with. Yet amidst all that compassion and guts, he remains a winter mystery to a person like myself.
Now I'm not going to discuss Cliff Ulen who roomed with Mike the summer before the action. Cliff pleaded "guilty" and dropped out of the group shortly after the arrests. Some think him the informer. The simplest and kindest thing I can say is that he was a young kid whose ideals went beyond his compassion. The raid I'm sure was more of an adventure to him than anything else – a college prank? When he was caught, he froze. All the time in the County Jail he looked like the nervous man on the Sominex commercial. At present he has been sentenced to five years, probation. To get that sentence, he had to "kiss ass" as they say in the court circuit. The only thing I feel for Cliff is pity. For whatever he is, informer or freaked‑out kid, he in the end sold his life over to a group of torturing goons who will play with his mind forever.
What I could now begin to tell you about Brad Beneke would fill a book Only since Brad has gone into prison, about three months now, have I seen the little things about him which I cherish and which I dislike. Brad is a whirlwind dance. He's tender. Excitable. Moody. He walks around Minneapolis' streets at night strumming his guitar, singing. He's a person many find hard to get to know, yet he'd sit down and pour out his guts to you over a cup of coffee ‑‑ that is, if he drank coffee. Brad doesn't drink booze, coffee or tea. However, we have smoked a fair amount of grass together, and had a few mind‑spirit trips out in the Minnesotan north woods and Washington's Puget Sound.
I laugh to myself when I think about describing Brad to anyone. On his spirit earth's dust never settles. See, he has the All American boy background. His family is staunch Republican attorney, active politically, and nurtured on Norman Vincent Peale type manners. When playing a sport Brad is a maddening enthusiast. He's fairly short, say around 5‑9" yet he's stocky and hard‑muscled as hell. Whenever he has a problem, his guts churn and churn. Everyone knots their tension somewhere: several times we had to take Brad to General’s emergency room because of his volcanic stomach. Among the Beneke family there is a strong bond of love, particularly strong between Brad, his brother Bruce, and their dad, Arnold. It’s a strange type of emotion for some, they argue with tornado intensity and clamor when together. For years Brad was the spoiled child of the family, “Our good son" who threw away the Great Dream and went galloping off into the woods of left‑mossed trees: Marxism, anarchism, conscientious objector, and socialism.
To his mother Millie's dismay Brad likes to call himself a socialist … or he’ll say he’s a communist to get a rise out of you and some heated conversation. Yet he also broods. Not like Mike, though. Rather, he just gets quiet when he doesn't feel like talking. It's infuriating. We all caught onto this trick: Brad would rap for hours when he’d have something to tell us, then he’d clam up for hours. When he’s quiet you know he not only disagrees ‑‑ but he knows that he's in the minority among friends. Outside with others, Brad really likes to argue up hill. He’s a terribly attractive person. Meaning by this that after the draft raids, every other person I met seemed to know Brad. Often I'd pick some kid up hitchhiking and get around to talking about the Eight and he'd say, "Say, I know Brad Beneke." And so forth. In high school Brad was the hero: a garland of athletic letters, especially in wrestling and football. When he went to Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, he played Freshman football and began studies for the Lutheran ministry. After one year he dropped out and came to the Twin Cities to live with his brother Bruce while Bruce was finishing Law school. Before I met him, Brad had put a stint in as a psychiatric assistant in some group therapy at the local Glenwood Hills psychiatric hospital. He always talks of that experience. It radically changed his life. Brad never got over the way those young people were treated; the types of families they came from and were sent back to. During that period, Brad saw how much emphasis society put on adjustment. Adjustment to the System. Blind, impersonal, compassionless adjustment. People didn't question the value of the System, they were told to just adjust ‑ obediently. Brad will never adjust!
Brad and I roomed together for about six months. He came over after the “Beaver 55” raids and needed a place to stay. I was working then at the Newman Center and could pay the rent. One other fellow lived with us, a truly unforgettable Iron Range character by the name of Steve Skorich, whom unfortunately I cannot fit into this story. During these six months together, I really grew fond of Brad. He was an odd mixture for me, the theologian‑professor type. He was a younger fellow who had dropped out of college ‑‑ something I could never have done. He spent a lot of time by himself reading and playing the guitar. And I found him mysteriously hard to get to know. When I went home to Glencoe with him I was really confused. Here was this young, active, deeply thinking, and very gentle man blowing hurricane winds between himself and his mother. But that was just the murky flow of the deep which is the Benekes. In fact I have come to really love that about Brad. He will always try to be up front emotionally. He keeps saying ‑‑ and said throughout his trial ‑‑ that what he cant abide are people who live without passion.
Now, like the rest of us searching people, Brad has many faults. But they are the things which only close friends know about and at times care about. As a character I guess I can say that Brad is the type of person you meet and ten minutes later find yourself intimately sharing your life with, and trusting him with your sensitivities. When the rest of us were hesitant about any more draft raids in Minnesota after the Beaver 55 – {Damn, did we do that one, too?!} - it was the combination of brash Brad and constant Chuck which kept us going. Personally, I always have a thousand reasons for not doing, and for doing, any set thing. Brad, like Chuck, is the character on top of life's wheel who continually keeps people doing things. "We've got to keep acting. We can't let down. We can't let the times pass." And so, the rest of us are drawn. To literary people the eight of us are all "strong" characters. Yet Chuck and Brad call forth from a passion almost subterranean and dark. They are truly passionate mystics who keep the blood in the human body of peoplekind flowing and beating with a fire-blood heart.
As for myself. I'm the person among the group who had to try and write about everyone else. You should think about that ‑‑ it's a very telling fact! The rest did the action. Went to jail. Came to trial. Got sentenced. Turned themselves into prison for a five year stretch. Not so smoothly do things go for me. No, ever since the trial ended I've been trying to gather images and words about them. My first draft was a 500 page long semi‑academic manuscript using a lot of newspaper clippings and verbatim courtroom transcription. Slowly over the last four months I came to write in this personal fashion. Of the first draft a close friend said, "I can't find you in it." Yes, Frank the academician. The one trained to be a detached observer, even of his own most intimate actions and thoughts. In a way, I am the one with the least feelings. Or, at least my feelings are blocked up more.
For example, when we were in the County Jail together, the days were dank and closet hot. Everyone in the tier