This slender book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of the Vietnam war and ecclesiastical historiography. It includes a first-hand perspective. Gary Kulik is an historian: he is a former assistant director of the Smithsonian Museum of American History and has published several books and a number of scholarly articles; but the subject of this book is more than history to him. Kulik himself was a conscientious objector medic in the US Army in the Vietnam war; the book is dedicated ‘To my fellow conscientious objector medics who served in Vietnam’. This is a work of contemporary history, however, not a memoir, though it makes use of memoirs and Kulik does draw on his own experiences at times. His sources are overwhelmingly oral histories by Vietnam veterans. The result is a richly textured book. It is not constructed as a narrative, but instead sequentially tells the stories of medics from different faith traditions who declined to bear arms.
In the introduction, Kulik makes the point that conscientious objectors are often thought of as non-participants in war, but in the United States, while it was legally possible to refuse on conscientious grounds to serve in the armed forces at all (with civilian service standing in instead), it was also possible to conscientiously object to bearing arms while still serving; such a conscientious objector served as a noncombatant. This is the group the Kulik is examining: men who served, without carrying weapons, which they declined to do for conscientious reasons. Such men, he writes ‘occup[ied] a gray zone’ (p. 5). But noncombatancy was no protection from the dangers of combat: several noncombatant medics died as a result of enemy action.
Chapter i provides a concise ‘Historical background to noncombatant service’. This is a valuable contribution since there is no overall synthesis of conscientious objection or pacifism in American history. There was a longer history in the United States than in Britain and its empire of recognising the rights of those who either did not wish to serve or did not wish to bear arms; this was partly due to the significance in the US of Quakers, Mennonites and Seventh-day Adventists, all of whom had scruples about combat (this is not an exhaustive list of American denominations that encouraged their members to noncombatancy or outright pacifism). When the United States entered World War I, it, unlike the United Kingdom, made provision for those who did not want to bear arms to serve as noncombatants, though those whose sincerity was suspected often found themselves subject to courts martial and harsh punishment. By World War II, noncombatancy or pacifistic refusal to serve at all were better recognised and a system for processing such men worked fairly well. An Adventist noncombatant medic, Desmond Doss, won the Medal of Honour on Okinawa in 1945, after heroically saving dozens of wounded comrades. By the time of the Vietnam war there was a well-trodden pathway to noncombatant service in the US armed forces and provision had been made for young men who had an ethical objection to killing, as well as those who objected on religious grounds. Kulik pays some attention to ‘Operation Whitecoat’, a US Army programme for testing ‘human trials of vaccines and antibiotics for certain disabling bacteriological agents’ (p. 28). Seventh-day Adventist Church leaders had entered into a partnership with the US Army by which Adventist young men would be funnelled into this human testing, which took place near Washington, DC. This was enthusiastically accepted by Adventists at the time, but looks ethically dubious from a twenty-first-century perspective. However, places on the Whitecoat programme were always limited and so Adventists ended up serving – and dying – as medics in Vietnam.
Chapter ii tells the story of a pantheist, able to obtain noncombatant status as the result of a US Supreme Court decision that broadened the scope of pacifist and noncombatant provisions. It meant ‘Buddhists, Confucianists, and Taoists’ and men who subscribed to a strong secular morality ‘could now successfully claim to be conscientious objectors’ (p. 33). Chapter iii is the story of a Roman Catholic noncombatant, who faced the difficulty that his Church, unlike historic peace Churches, did not endorse pacifism or noncombatancy; but he was able to plead his personal conscientious position. Chapter iv tells the stories of five Adventists; as Kulik observes, ‘Seventh-day Adventists made up roughly half of all conscientious objector medics, yet their stories remain largely untold.’ What made Adventists different from some other denominations was that Adventist ‘Church leaders, voicing their patriotism, saw themselves as “conscientious cooperators” [a term they often used] rather than “objectors”.’ Chapter v is the story of a young man who tried to claim noncombatant status only after he had already enlisted in the Marines, whereas a man was supposed to identify himself as a conscientious objector when conscripted. The marine in question was ‘[o]ffered a position as a stretcher-bearer’, was killed in action and was ‘awarded a Navy Cross for his heroism, unrecognized as a conscientious objector’. Chapter vi examines the experiences of three medics (two of them Adventists) who have published memoirs, rather than being based on oral histories. Chapter viii, painfully, tells the stories of noncombatant medics who were killed in action or, in one case, surviving Vietnam, later took his own life. Chapter ix is the story of a noncombatant medic who was also a published poet.
What emerges from all of these is the moral toll taken on the men whose careers in Vietnam are examined. Survivor’s guilt and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder were common. A number of veterans were wounded and decorated for valour – they might have been noncombatant, but Kulik quotes one distinguished combat officer who called them ‘the bravest of the brave’ (p. 110). It is not clear that noncombatant medics’ experiences of Vietnam were notably different from those of other Vietnam veterans, but this makes an important contribution; noncombatant service did not exempt those in question from the extreme dangers (psychological as well as physical) of combat, and this emerges very clearly. What is also clear is the extent to which these noncombatants were motivated by conscience and generally by religious views.
