Howard Levy

​​        I was part of a plan whereby doctors could defer being called into the Army to allow them to finish whatever specialty training they were doing. I really didn’t want to go into the military. It just seemed that since they were drafting young doctors, I was going to go whether I liked it or not, so I might as well go on my terms. At the time I made the commitment the war in Vietnam was just a little blip. As the war began to escalate, and my time to go began to draw near, which was in ’65, my opinion about the war changed drastically. By now there was no question where I was coming from with regard to Vietnam. The only question was, what the hell do I do about it? I went into the Army figuring number one, I’ll buy time. Number two, I worked it out so I would be sent down South, where I figured I could at least do some civil rights work that I’d been wanting to do anyhow. And number three, I figured I’ll draw the line somewhere. I knew where that was going to be: when they ordered me to go to Vietnam.

​        I was stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where I ran a clinic, and every night and on weekends I would go to the town of Prosperity to work with an organization that was registering blacks to vote. At some point the Army assigned some Green Beret guys to me and I was supposed to train them in some aspect of dermatology. I did that for a number of months, which really allowed me to get to know them. The more I got to know them, the more upsetting some of their stories became. I reached a point when I just said, “Look, I’ve figured this out and I can’t train you guys anymore.” I said, “I don’t really want you in the clinic, so let’s not make a big fuss about it, but I want you to leave.” And they did. Each month a new guy would come and I’d give him the same spiel. That went on for a number of months.

             By the time charges were brought against me, I only had another two or three months in the Army. It turns out from the trial testimony that Military Intelligence knew of my activities within days, maybe hours of me arriving in Prosperity. But actually they had been tracing me from my days when I was involved in some Socialist Worker Party stuff, before I went in the Army. My CO was only going to give me a slap on the wrist until they threw the intelligence report on his desk which detailed the fact that I was a fucking Communist. That’s basically what it said. He then decided it was going to be court-martial.

        We tried to put the war on trial, but the military court said the truth is no defense. Another defense we used was medical ethics, saying the real objection to training the Green Berets is that they were using medicine as just another propaganda tool. If you had a bunch of kids in a poor village in Vietnam, and you gave them a shot of penicillin and cured them of their impetigo and suddenly they looked much healthier and didn’t have ugly skin things all over their bodies, you would probably make some friends in town. That strikes me as illegitimate because it can be taken away as easily as it can be given. That’s not a basis for doing medicine.

       ​I was sentenced to three years in Leavenworth. The only shock was … it wasn’t nine.