United States vs FR Drury

Inside, I fall prey to yet another fan­tasy as my thoughts drift back to the first time I won­dered why the Lord of Dark­ness had fought so hard to keep me in the dark about this island of mine. For if left alone, long enough, I’d invari­ably get sucked into the fight as the forces of dark­ness rose up against me, to inun­date me with their lies. So would I lose sight of who I really am until I reemerged from this lat­est flood of images with some heretofore-​​unrecognized truth about myself. Unchal­lenged, I would never have taken the plunge into this two-​​dimensional, holo­graphic world of his to free my soul from her impris­on­ment in nature. Nor would I have ever got­ten to the bot­tom of the mat­ter of the United States vs FR Drury.

“You’re late,” booms a voice from out across the thresh­old of con­scious­ness as I step forth from the looking-​​glass world of my soul to greet the only defense I have, a legal adviser of my own ilk will­ing to take on Uncle Sam’s lieu­tenants for the sake of the soul alone.

“Have you rewrit­ten your state­ment?” he asks as I enter the court­room to be judged, this time around, on the grounds of my own being instead of theirs.

“I have,” I respond with a big grin, “to more accu­rately reflect what has taken place inside me over the past two years.”

“Good,” he replies.

With that, in bursts the recorder—or lawyer for the Navy—like a steam engine from the judge’s cham­ber. As the five offi­cers, who will decide my fate, file past him, like empty box­cars, to take up their pre­dis­posed posi­tions on this lone­some freight, he com­mands the real E. J. Drury to please stand up.

Not until the only ear on the whole damn train, the court reporter in the caboose, has set her­self up to record all this gib­ber­ish, am I told to be seated by the senior mem­ber of the board, a throw­back to pre­his­toric times named Fitzgibbons.

As he swings from one limb to another in my mind’s eye, like some great tail­less ape does he con­vene the hearing.

SENIOR MEMBER: This hear­ing will come to order. This hear­ing con­vened in the Gen­eral Court Mar­tial Room of the Com­man­dant, Four­teenth Naval Dis­trict, U.S. Naval Sta­tion, Pearl Har­bor, Hawaii, in accor­dance with the Com­mand­ing Offi­cer, USS Golds­bor­ough DDG-​​20, appoint­ing order ser­ial 603 dated 4 Novem­ber 1968. The appointed mem­bers of the board are all present.

The board con­vened at 0927 hours, 7 Novem­ber 1968.

Fire­man Recruit Drury is the respon­dent in this hear­ing and shall be referred to as such through­out these proceedings.

Mr. Brook Hart will rep­re­sent the respondent.

As this great ape swung past the court reporter to intro­duce us all to the recorder, another tail­less ape of less rank named Glea­son, I fell vic­tim to my own thoughts about my defense.

An attor­ney admit­ted to prac­tice before the Bar of New York and Hawaii, this young and impec­ca­bly dressed upstart’d been retained by the Hawaii Resis­tance to defend me, one among a grow­ing clien­tele of young rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies refus­ing to coöper­ate with either the mil­i­tary or the draft. Even though he, him­self, had not evolved that far, he adamantly defended those who like myself had. For he still believed that the legal sys­tem pro­tected the rights of those who oppose all mil­i­tary ser­vice, or at least afforded redress when these rights were tram­pled upon by the old evo­lu­tion­ary order. And because he believed that the law could change the atti­tudes of these Nean­derthals, that court­room drama could trans­form their hearts, he was for­ever encour­ag­ing me to oper­ate within the frame­work of the law.

But I had prob­lems with his approach. For I’d found that two very dif­fer­ent lev­els of law exist in life and that these two are often at odds with each other, because the one’d been fash­ioned by imper­fect hands, the other by God to show us how to act as human beings should we ever get there. So does the higher law, in its watered-​​down state, strug­gle to get out from under­neath this con­t­a­m­i­na­tion by the darker side of human nature. Like the pieces of an island sub­merged below the sur­face of the water does the higher law remain hid­den behind the man-​​made law in the shad­ows of human igno­rance until some indi­vid­ual dives deep enough below the sur­face to retrieve it.

Most peo­ple, who live on the sur­face, tend to move in the direc­tion of the man-​​made law, against the indi­vid­ual caught up in the under­cur­rent cre­ated by the higher law. Because these peo­ple lead sur­face lives, they believe only what they see on the sur­face. They dis­be­lieve the higher law when the indi­vid­ual brings it to the sur­face. Those who see real­ity, with the eyes and men­tal­ity of the sur­face only, are quick to denounce the higher law as pre­pos­ter­ous. Cling­ing to the man-​​made law, they try to dis­credit the indi­vid­ual, to pun­ish him or to elim­i­nate him by impris­on­ment or exe­cu­tion. They dis­play a low level of tol­er­ance for the indi­vid­ual who stands upto the cur­rent on the sur­face, for they don’t want to see their own darkness.

So do those who are guilty of the real crime, the trans­gres­sion of the hid­den but per­fect higher law, find the indi­vid­ual who obeys the higher law guilty of an obvi­ous crime, the trans­gres­sion of an imper­fect man-​​made law. The indi­vid­ual is then made to pay a great price for his trans­gres­sion by the peo­ple on the sur­face who, at first, appear to go scot-​​free in the face of their trans­gres­sion but, in the end, are made to pay an even greater price than the indi­vid­ual himself.

As I begin to won­der what effect, if any, I will have on these Nean­derthals today, I am pulled back into this cha­rade by way of an inquiry from the leader of this pack of tail­less apes.

SENIOR MEMBER: Are there any ques­tions as to the pro­ceed­ings of the board con­cern­ing the rights of the respondent?

MR. HART: No ques­tions, other than I under­stand that we have the right to ask cer­tain ques­tions of the mem­bers of the board to deter­mine whether they may or may not have a pre­de­ter­mined opin­ion about what should be done with the respon­dent in this case.

SENIOR MEMBER: Yes, that’s right. Do you wish to ques­tion any mem­bers of the board con­cern­ing their qualifications?

MR. HART: Yes, I would.

QUESTIONS BY COUNSEL:

Q. Mr. Fitzgib­bons, how long have you been in the Navy?

A. Eleven and a half years, sir.

Q. Have you ever served on an admin­is­tra­tive board before?

A. Yes, I have.

Q. Could you esti­mate how many?

A. Two.

Q. Have you ever served on a court-​​martial board?

A. Yes, I have.

Q. Would you esti­mate how many?

A. About twenty.

Q. Now have you ever had any occa­sion, in the course of your eleven and a half years of ser­vice, to have con­tact with any naval per­son­nel who opposed mil­i­tary service?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you have any prior knowl­edge as to the reg­u­la­tions per­tain­ing to the pro­cess­ing of such an individual?

A. Noth­ing spe­cific, only the gen­eral back­ground which every naval offi­cer, you might say, should have.

Q. Could you describe briefly for me, what that back­ground is?

A. While I am aware that there are pro­ce­dures recently revised by the Depart­ment of Defense to afford any mem­ber of the naval ser­vice the right to refuse mil­i­tary ser­vice if he under­stands the true mean­ing of mil­i­tary ser­vice, and that there are cer­tain for­mal pro­ce­dures which should be fol­lowed in these cases, I am not famil­iar with the details.

Q. Now, Mr. Fitzgib­bons, do you have any per­sonal feel­ings about a man who would refuse to kill those he has been ordered to kill?

A. No, sir.

Q. If the evi­dence were to show that Drury has refused to take part in the killing of other human beings as a fact, which was his rea­son for hav­ing been involved in cer­tain mat­ters, you’d have no prior opin­ion of his refusal to kill on another’s command?

A. No, sir. If I may point out, as far as any indi­vid­ual refus­ing to take part in the killing of other human beings, I stand firm in my own per­sonal opin­ion that every indi­vid­ual has the right to refuse. As far as a prior notion, I have no pre­con­ceived notion one way or the other. I think I will have to ana­lyze the facts and the argu­ments as they come up, before I’m sure of what I’m talk­ing about.

Q. Now, do you know what ship Mr. Drury served on?

A. I’m aware he was trans­ferred to the Golds­bor­ough from the David­son, but know lit­tle else of his pre­vi­ous record or how long he had served on the Davidson.

Q. Do you know any­body on the Davidson?

A. Not personally—no, sir.

In like man­ner were the other mem­bers of the board grilled. Hav­ing nei­ther seen nor heard, nor spo­ken any­thing that might prej­u­dice them­selves against the Daniel who did so vocif­er­ously object to their way of life, did all but the last of these great tail­less apes step forth, unscathed, from the fiery fur­nace into which they had been cast by that Neb­uchad­nez­zar lawyer of mine to bridge the brook to their hearts. For it seemed that the last of this breed of war mon­ger­ing apes had actu­ally had con­tact with some­one on my old ship, the USS David­son. But he too failed to cough up any­thing more sig­nif­i­cant than this half-​​digested tid­bit as he fin­ished tes­ti­fy­ing in the same monkey-​​see, monkey-​​do fash­ion of those who had tes­ti­fied before him.

MR. HART: I have no fur­ther ques­tions; and I have no chal­lenges for cause.

SENIOR MEMBER: Does the recorder wish to chal­lenge any of the mem­bers of the board for cause?

RECORDER: The recorder does not.

SENIOR MEMBER: The recorder may now present his case.

RECORDER: Gen­tle­men of the board, FR Drury is before us today because of his repeated vio­la­tions of mil­i­tary law. I would like to sub­mit to you a brief con­cern­ing his con­duct dur­ing the past two years; and I’d like to intro­duce these exhibits now. They are con­tained in the green fold­ers in front of you.

As they all pawed over the papers in front of them with the hairy hands of the hideous Hyde that resided within the shal­low graves of every­one of these Jekylls, I winced at the mere men­tion that I am enti­tled to wear the National Defense Ser­vice Medal, the Viet­nam Ser­vice Medal with bronze star, and the Repub­lic of Viet­nam Cam­paign Bar for ser­vice onboard the USS David­son. Hav­ing been assigned, accord­ing to the recorder, a 2.6 out of a pos­si­ble 4.0 for mil­i­tary per­for­mance, appear­ance, and adapt­abil­ity, and a 1.0 for mil­i­tary behav­ior, because I con­tin­u­ally dis­obeyed mil­i­tary orders and flaunted all types of author­ity, made me feel a lit­tle bet­ter as it showed that I had at least been an unwill­ing par­tic­i­pant in the may­hem which we had wreaked upon the poor peo­ple of Viet­nam. In fact, I felt down­right proud of myself as he read off the long list of NJPs, or Captain’s Masts, and court-​​martials to which I had been sub­jected for my non­co­op­er­a­tion with the Navy as it only seemed to fur­ther bol­ster my point—how far I was will­ing to go to limit my par­tic­i­pa­tion in some­thing so totally abhor­rent to me as the war in Vietnam.

My bub­ble was pricked, how­ever, when this Hyde lit into my clin­i­cal records with the rel­ish of a rap­tor on his face, the sig­nal for which the leader of this vul­tur­ous pack of meat-​​eating apes seemed to have been waiting.

SENIOR MEMBER: Before you pro­ceed, the board would like to look over these psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tions so that we may prop­erly con­sider them in the con­text of the chronol­ogy of events in this case. If the recorder will stand by, we will famil­iar­ize our­selves with the con­tents of these doc­u­ments; and if we have any ques­tions, we will ask them before we pro­ceed any further.

I was con­cerned about how the board would view these psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tions of me, how much weight each mem­ber would give these reports. I dis­liked the senior member’s sud­den eager­ness to focus on them before I had the chance to prof­fer their con­tents. I felt vio­lated by these men who appeared much too eager to claw away at the worst secrets of my soul, like vul­tures over a car­cass, in search of the heart of this case as deter­mined by experts.

On the one hand, the eval­u­a­tions seemed to reveal too much—the secret tor­ments of my soul—the prob­lems I’d had deal­ing with my own sex­u­al­ity and adjust­ing not only to mil­i­tary life but also to life in gen­eral. On the other hand, the reports actu­ally exposed very lit­tle, only the symptoms—the tip of the ice­berg, as it were, of the far more seri­ous sick­ness of being dan­ger­ously out of touch with my soul.

In the report, dated 19 Feb­ru­ary 1968, the psy­chi­a­trist who’d inter­viewed me accused me of being “an imma­ture young man who is chron­i­cally rebelling against soci­ety and who has no insight into his provoca­tive­ness.” He claimed that “I pro­voked the envi­ron­ment into retal­i­at­ing against me as a way to explain my feel­ings of depres­sion, that my depres­sion has deeper roots than my cur­rent prob­lems, and that my behav­ior helps me to look on cur­rent prob­lems as an expla­na­tion for my dif­fi­cul­ties rather than to look into myself and my past.” He diag­nosed me as a schizoid and emo­tion­ally unsta­ble per­son­al­ity with pas­sive aggres­sive tendencies.

I was trou­bled by his obser­va­tions. From the very begin­ning of my term of enlist­ment, I sensed that I’d made a ter­ri­ble mis­take and that I had to do what­ever to get out of the Navy. Only later did I learn the true iden­tity of my provo­ca­teur as my soul with her unwa­ver­ing oppo­si­tion to mil­i­tary ser­vice and war in general.

As I stum­bled along under the weight of my own cross, over­time I found I could lighten my load if only I would suc­cumb to the urg­ings of my soul to rise up against the Navy and the war in Viet­nam instead of her and this house of mine, divided as it were against its self. Only then would I expe­ri­ence the inner peace and joy so lack­ing in my life when I broke down and coop­er­ated more fully with the Navy, pur­sued my own course of action, or caved into the desires of my ani­mal nature, which gen­er­ally left me feel­ing so unstable—or emo­tion­ally unat­tached to what the Navy wanted me to do—and depressed, that I often bit back at my cap­tor to relieve my anguish.

In the last psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tion I under­went on 27 Sep­tem­ber 1968, another psy­chi­a­trist wrote: “This man still man­i­fests emo­tional insta­bil­ity and a great deal of passive-​​aggressive rebel­lion to author­ity fig­ures in his argu­ments and his oppo­si­tion to mil­i­tary ser­vice. In explain­ing his posi­tion he speaks in grandiose gen­er­al­i­ties, often in con­flict with one another, and shows much con­fu­sion and stretch­ing of facts to con­form with his own philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem. I find no evi­dence of any true reli­gious or moral oppo­si­tion to his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the killing of other human beings, but feel that his asser­tions are based upon his pre­vi­ous diag­no­sis of emo­tional insta­bil­ity and pas­sive aggres­sion. That diag­no­sis is still valid. I rec­om­mend, as was rec­om­mended before, that this man be con­sid­ered for admin­is­tra­tive sep­a­ra­tion for unsuit­abil­ity on the basis of his estab­lished psy­chi­atric diagnosis.”

In the same breath that these wolves in sheep’s cloth­ing had accused me of hav­ing no insight into myself, they as much as admit­ted to their lack of insight into the prob­lems of human sex­u­al­ity and war. When they claimed I stretched the facts to con­form to my own philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem, they admit­ted to their own stretch­ing of the truth, which they saw as grandiose gen­er­al­i­ties in con­flict with their per­cep­tion of real­ity. Diag­noses, such as schizoid or emo­tion­ally unsta­ble or pas­sive aggres­sive, only showed their split from soul in the choice to pur­sue a mil­i­tary career—literally exposed the insta­bil­ity of their own posi­tion, built on the sands of half-​​truths and lies—and exhib­ited their own pas­sive aggres­sive ten­den­cies to den­i­grate me and my oppo­si­tion to mil­i­tary ser­vice and war in gen­eral. For it was they who had sown the seeds of my rebel­lion in the first place. Clearly, these so-​​called doc­tors of the soul were not out to help me as much as they were out to hin­der me. They couldn’t help me; for not one of them had any­thing more pos­i­tive to offer than the life­less responses of the dead men who, in pio­neer­ing the field of psy­chol­ogy, had barely touched upon the true nature of the soul. Hav­ing never entered their own beings to search for the truth of them­selves, they feared and attacked the truth instead.

So would it be left to me to ven­ture where they dared not tread, to stum­ble through the dark­est cor­ners of my being in search of the hid­den pieces to the puz­zling prob­lems of my exis­tence, that I might con­vey a more com­plete pic­ture of myself to the mem­bers of the board and explain to them the events of the past two years of my life.

SENIOR MEMBER: Very well, let us continue.

RECORDER: Gen­tle­men, you are here to decide, on the basis of the infor­ma­tion before you, and of the infor­ma­tion which Drury will sub­mit, if Drury should be retained in the US Navy or dis­charged, and if so, what type of dis­charge he should receive. You are not here to decide how or why Drury vio­lated the UCMJ, nor are you here to decide if he was right in doing so. You are not here to pass judg­ment on his rea­sons, nor on his con­vic­tions. But you must reach the deci­sion, reten­tion or dis­charge. Now per­haps Drury or his coun­sel will present wit­nesses tes­ti­fy­ing to the sin­cer­ity of Drury’s char­ac­ter, or try to jus­tify his mis­be­hav­ior. This is not the ques­tion here.

Gen­tle­men, if Drury were being tried in a court of law this may be proper in exten­u­a­tion or mit­i­ga­tion. The offense has been committed—the guilt has been decided—and there is no use argu­ing the point. We must pre­sume that Drury knew full well when he com­mit­ted these offenses that they were in vio­la­tion of the very Code under which we all live and work. He also knew that for these acts or omis­sions he would be pun­ished. Whether or not Drury had a rea­son to com­mit these offenses has no bear­ing what­so­ever on this board’s deci­sion. The facts are clear. There is no issue cloud­ing them. Drury knew full well what he was doing; and now the piper has to be paid.

SENIOR MEMBER: Does the coun­sel for the respon­dent wish to make a statement?

MR. HART: Yes, I do. Quite respect­fully, I would dis­agree with the state­ment made to the board by the recorder. By way of agree­ment, I’d say that Drury has been the sub­ject of judi­cial pro­ceed­ings through­out his career in the Navy. How­ever, our only con­sid­er­a­tion here is whether or not Drury is to be retained in the Navy, not whether he’s been con­victed or not. What’s rel­e­vant, are the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing these vio­la­tions. If they’re not rel­e­vant, we can all pack up and go home. For if it were not rel­e­vant that these cir­cum­stances be brought to you, there’d be no point in hav­ing this proceeding.

Drury’s posi­tion is not that he is here to jus­tify what he did. You may find there are some things he was charged here with for which he was ulti­mately acquit­ted. You will also find there are cir­cum­stances you will want to seri­ously con­sider in your deter­mi­na­tion of what you are going to want to do with him.

Basi­cally, you have two choices, reten­tion or dis­charge. If it’s the lat­ter, you have a num­ber of other choices. And those choices go to the type of dis­charge. For the type of dis­charge, which one receives from the mil­i­tary, stays with him for the rest of his life. The rea­son for that is that cer­tain types of dis­charge oper­ate as a kind of pun­ish­ment in civil­ian life. It affects the nature of a job he might hold, the atti­tude of those who may deal with him. It affects the pos­si­bil­ity of his going back to school. All of these are impor­tant. Now, if you do decide for a dis­charge, first you have to deter­mine what kind of dis­charge. And there are going to be mainly two tests. One of them is prob­a­bly quite appar­ent to you, and that is the nature of this man’s psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tions, as evi­denced by the reports of the doc­tors you have before you. As lay men, you will con­sider, in your own good faith, whether or not that evi­dence should be taken under con­sid­er­a­tion in your deter­mi­na­tion of the type of dis­charge this man should receive. On the other hand, I think the evi­dence will show that Mr. Drury is sin­cere and trust­wor­thy, and that his actions can be char­ac­ter­ized only as imma­ture in the case of some of the acts. So what kind of dis­charge is proper, that this man should have to carry with him through his adult life—a dis­hon­or­able or an unde­sir­able discharge?

Per­haps you might con­sider a gen­eral dis­charge under other than hon­or­able con­di­tions, or a gen­eral dis­charge under hon­or­able con­di­tions. Here’s a man who has been in the brig; he’s done extra duty and been busted. He is not here to pay the piper as Mr. Glea­son sug­gested ear­lier. You are here to deter­mine the type of dis­charge with which he’ll have to go out into civil­ian life, to make his way.…

…At this time, coun­sel for the respon­dent would like to call FR Drury to the stand as the respon­dent wishes to tes­tify in his own behalf—to read a state­ment which he has com­posed for the board, respond to direct ques­tion­ing with respect to his con­duct in the Navy, and to be avail­able for what, I hope, will be a thor­ough and exten­sive exam­i­na­tion by both the recorder and the mem­bers of the board.

The more I thought about it, the more I real­ized that this hear­ing was about the trans­gres­sions of these men as well—the trans­gres­sions of soul or blas­phemes of the Holy Spirit that will never be forgiven—the trans­gres­sions of the laws of the jun­gle that were writ­ten in our hearts so long ago, for­bid­ding us to kill but what we eat. And the deeper I dove, the more I real­ized how much this hear­ing was about judg­ment too—how those, who would judge me today, will indeed judge them­selves in the end—how those who have failed to evolve, emo­tion­ally, beyond the level of an ani­mal will judge their own humanity.