Interview with Vietnam War resister Gerry Condon

He told his story of becoming a resister to Socialist Worker’s KELLY HOLLOWAY.

Gerry joined the army in April 1967, two days after his twentieth birthday. He had dropped out of college for a while to work, and so lost the opportunity to avoid the draft as a student. He decided to get the inevitable underway by enlisting.

He was from a conservative home, but his religious upbringing had given him a sense of moral justice. "I really had the idea of the courage of conscience pounded into me. In other words, being willing to do the right thing, regardless of consequences."

He had serious doubts about the war before he went in. Before joining he had written to the draft board asking to be recognized as a Conscientious Objector. But he was refused.

Six months later, he joined hundreds of other young men like him in military training. Being forced to shout "kill the gooks" (in the racist terminology used by many soldiers) while running around with rifles brought out all of his anti-war feelings.

He was trained as a Green Beret, which meant that he was probably not going to have to go to war any time soon. But the more he heard about the war, the more he knew he couldn’t be a part of it.

In August of 1968 he decided to get out. He went home to San Mateo and wrote up a statement against the war and went to the papers announcing that he was going to refuse all further orders. The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Mateo Times headlined "Anti-war Green Beret Drops Out," with a picture of Gerry in uniform — and his battle began.

"Then I went back to Fort Brag to face the music," he said. "I was planning to go to jail, because I didn’t know how to resist and like a good Catholic martyr you accept the consequences."

He was kicked out of the Green Berets, court marshaled, and charged with a maximum sentence of ten years. "They wanted to make an example out of me," he said. A jury of his peers was made up of colonels, captains and majors, all sporting Vietnam combat medals. "It was a hanging jury for sure."

Gerry hadn’t been jailed yet. It was days before his trial and surprisingly he had the opportunity to go AWOL for a three-day weekend — a last breath of freedom. But after having a chance to think about the prospect of a ten-year prison sentence, he took the few belongings he had in his knapsack, sidled up to a roadside and stuck out his thumb. "I had a last minute chance to escape, and I took it."

He hitchhiked to New York, and made two phone calls, to his mom and his lawyer. "My poor mom — it was a painful thing for her to see me putting myself in a position where I could go to prison and she didn’t really understand it, but she had almost gotten used to that and she got a call from me from New York."

His lawyers were the top two attorneys for the American Civil Liberty Union. Gerry had been prepared to tell the courts that he was not guilty because the war was illegal. It was an illegal order he was going to disobey. His lawyers were dying to make the case, but the chances of winning were very slim. "So I had to call them and say: ‘sorry for all your hard work, but I decided to quit..’"

He took a bus to Montreal in February of 1969. He didn’t know any other resisters and was afraid of reaching out to the anti-war movement for help. "There was so much red-baiting that was going on and I came from an anti-communist environment."

Canada was "a blank screen" for Gerry before he came to Montreal. He found Quebec alive with the anti-war movement and experienced the relief of freedom. "I just felt so liberated. Just to be away from the drama that I was facing — war or prison."

He stayed in a little house organized by the American Deserters Committee for a while but didn’t settle in Canada at first. He went to Germany, then to Sweden, where he again met the anti-war movement in full force. "I think my real education was in Sweden," he said.

It was there that he was exposed to Swedish anti-war activists drumming up support for the National Liberation Front and the anti-war newspaper he eventually wrote for, the Paper Brigade.

In Sweden, he helped deserters and resisters from all over the world set up a new life. "We were exposed to political exiles from around the world," he said. "We were learning that there was a worldwide imperialist system."

"It took a while to shed this ideology that we grow up with that somehow the United States is a force of good in the world," said Gerry. Many resisters became revolutionaries after being exposed to the world-wide anti-war movement.

Some resisters were so opposed to the US government that they saw it as illegitimate. Those who considered themselves exiles wanted to go back, said Gerry. It was a revolutionary time, and they wanted to change their country.

Gerry left Sweden in 1972 and moved to Toronto, then eventually to Vancouver where he helped form the Vancouver American Exiles Association, and became an outpost for AMEX or American Exile, a political collective of American deserters and draft resisters who continued to oppose the Vietnam war from Canada.

And he continues today to fight for the rights of resisters.

At one point in his travels Gerry had the opportunity to meet up with some of the men he had trained with in Germany. Most were supportive, venerating him with a certain amount of awe, as the person that had resisted. It struck Gerry as strange:

He reflected on the fact that a lot of people probably wanted to resist the war.

It is indeed the case that eventually, many of them did. More than 50,000 Americans came to Canada resisting the Vietnam War. It was the bravery of people like Gerry that inspired them, and that continues to inspire people to resist wars even today.

"In a way for some of us to be able to support Jeremy and Brandon and others who come up — its like reconnecting with our own history and reaffirming the struggle that has been most important for us. Its an opportunity to hold up the banner high, that says it’s right to resist an unjust war," said Gerry.