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SPEAKER: I do feel that this is a very welcome occasion. Just the idea of giving serious thought to the quest for peace would seem the most appropriate and logical of notions. But like most appropriate and logical notions, it's rarely undertaken in our halls of government or learning.

And for that reason, incidentally, I also welcome the development of peace studies here as a serious effort in the same direction with quite remarkable forethought that has gone into it. I feared, as I'm sure others did, for this conference, originally. Talking about the quest for peace, more readily than almost any other subject, can lead to platitudes and nice thoughts. I don't think it has. I don't think any of us had too many nice thoughts.

I think people have really expressed themselves with content in terms of the difficulties because the quest for peace includes every single difficulty that exists in international, national, and individual existence. It's the ultimate quest, without which, there's nothing.

Of course, one must have a great sense of individual limitation in terms of what can accomplish. One really must have something like the spirit of Camus' Dr. Rieux in his novel The Plague, in which the plague is, of course, a metaphor for evil. Dr. Rieux, behaving heroically but quietly, simply tending to his patients in the midst of great personal danger over the course of the plague, finally is enormously tired as the plague subsides.

And in his discussion with his friends, Camus says, well, he knows the plague will reappear. It will come back, and he'll never be able to really overcome it. But he also knows that he cannot be a man, a human being unless he keeps tending to his patients and making that effort.

That's the sense in which I think we must all approach the issue of peace. And we don't, know, as Mrs. [INAUDIBLE] said and said very well, the effects of what we do. They may be less, and indeed, more than what we think they could be.

I want to argue that the quest for peace is inseparable from the way in which we survive our previous war or wars, and not just our wars, but our holocausts and losses of all kinds. To put it another way, human life, individual and collective, cannot be divested of pain and loss, and above all, of death. And our ability to avoid annihilation and to survive as a species may well depend upon our capacity to derive wisdom from that pain and loss and from our confrontation with the grotesque forms of death we have inflicted on ourselves, and indeed, our confrontation with death itself.

I want to look at this question primarily in terms of the disastrous American intervention in Vietnam, which, in any number of ways, is still very much with us. I want to emphasize that although the quest for peace has many technical and organizational considerations, it is never merely technical. It must involve hard political and ethical considerations. And in that spirit, I will be talking about political and ethical matters within the context of the quest for peace.

I want to refer to what has been well called the post-war war which now exists both in Vietnam and in the United States. Of course, there's a war still active in Vietnam, although there is not active American-- there's not direct military participation by Americans. There's lots of American participation in the military enterprise through providing virtually all of the guns, the military equipment, and indeed, still, subadvisors that have a lot to do with the cruel prison system in South Vietnam.

But the war I want to talk about, the post-war war I want to talk about is that over consciousness, the struggle over the residual meaning of the Vietnam War as perceived by groups, often antagonistic, in American society and throughout the world. I want to talk about contending expressions of survival that can be looked at rather systematically, though they have implications that are enormous and, at times, unmanageable, both intellectually and politically.

Now, the way in which one survives a war, the imagery around survival has much to do with the way in which one actually fights and ends it. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it isn't, I don't think. What I mean is that the survivor imagery begins to take shape long before the war itself is over.

In my book Home From the War, which is a study of Vietnam veterans, I try to show how extreme and immediate feelings of grief and loss on the part of GIs following the death of buddies have a direct bearing on the commission of such atrocities as My Lai.

Not many people realize that the night before My Lai, the commanding officer of that unit gave a combination pep talk and funeral eulogy after the grotesque death of a much-loved sergeant who was an older man, a kind of father figure, just a day or two before, in which he spoke of that man, Sergeant Cox, as well as of others who had died in another mine disaster a couple of weeks prior to that.

And the gist of his words was, we've got to get back at them now. This is our chance. This is the traditional funeral eulogy in which the purpose of the eulogy is an expression of the continuity of the life of the dead person by carrying out his or her work. In the case of war, that means getting back at the enemy.

In the case of counterinsurgency war, where everybody and nobody is the enemy, as in Vietnam, and you're hungry for an enemy and can't find him, you create an enemy, inevitably, out of peasants-- old men, women, children, everyone. This is what I mean by an atrocity-producing situation.

The survivor imagery of the men individually propels them toward it, but the external structure of the situation creates its nature. And that structure consists-- as described by Sartre, consists of a revolution taking place in a country of low technology, a revolution that has some standing with its people, with a counter-revolutionary intervention by a country of alien culture with high technology.

That combination creates what Sartre calls a genocidal situation, what I'm calling an atrocity-producing situation. And the intervening elements are the military policies-- in this case, the policy of the search-and-destroy mission and the free-fire zone, which simply gave a pseudo legitimacy to this policy of slaughter and genocide.

Survivor imagery around wars is also self-perpetuating-- this has been referred to in earlier talks-- either as imagery of revenge for one's defeat or humiliation or else as a kind of fatigue with the entire enterprise of war. One could look particularly at the relationship between World War I and World War II, which I'll merely suggest here-- its influence upon, let's say, the Germans and the French.

There's a fascinating study that perhaps many of you are familiar with of Verdun, the slaughter at Verdun by Alistair Horne called The Price of Glory. In addition to describing that slaughter, he makes the point that the hero of Verdun, Marshall Petain, was appalled by the slaughter and became a hero by winning something like a small victory and stopping the slaughter.

And his resulting emotions around that survival, so Horne suggests, and probably truly, I think, must have had a good deal to do with his utter fatigue, as well as whatever right-wing inclinations he might have had and his inability to mobilize a sense of resistance that is in him and in many other Frenchmen at the time of World War II and the Nazi invasion. In the case of Germany, of course, the German rearmament and the enormous support for Hitler was much around chauvinistic demands for revenge for her humiliation and betrayal, as it was perceived, at Versailles.

In my work in Hiroshima around the experience of the survivor, I tried to delineate a general pattern that seemed consistent for virtually all survivors. I compared the patterns I encountered in Hiroshima survivors with patterns observed by others in survivors of Nazi death camps and also in survivors of the plagues of the Middle Ages, as recorded by them and written about, and then compared these, to some extent, with effects in natural disasters and in simply the everyday survival of somebody to whom one is very close, that one loves.

And there's a common set of survivor themes that I want to suggest to you because they're very relevant to what I want to say about war and peace. A central theme, the first of these elements is what I call the death imprint, the impact of death and one's loss of a sense of invulnerability-- the kind of magic sense that we have that we're invulnerable, and it's the other fellow who's going to die in battle or elsewhere-- and a need to confront death in some degree as a survivor, one's own death.

Second is the issue of death guilt, the classical question of the survivor. Why did I remain alive, while he, or she, or they died? And of course, compounded by whatever one did, or thought one did, or did or did not do in the way of staying alive and not saving others.

The third pattern I call psychic numbing or desensitization-- the loss of the capacity to feel. Hiroshima people described it to me as a paralysis of the mind, in very vivid terms. It's a desensitization that's psychologically useful at the moment of experiencing holocaust because it protects one from feeling what would otherwise be emotionally overwhelming.

It protects one's sanity, so to speak, or temporary death, in a sense. It protects one's psychic life. But of course, over the course of time for survivors of Hiroshima, that numbing could give way to depression, despair, and long-term constriction and withdrawal. So it was not without its consequences.

As I looked into the issue of psychic numbing, I also asked questions about desensitization at the other end of the weapon-- those who create, whether it's scientists, technicians, or contemplate using, as politicians or military men, nuclear weapons and the need for such psychic numbing in order not to be able to feel what goes on at the other end of those weapons. And indeed, psychic numbing in all of us around issues of nuclear weapons and much else.

The fourth pattern of the survivor has to do with a suspicion of all relationships, a suspicion of the counterfeit, or what I call a suspicion of counterfeit nurturance. And finally, the overall struggle of the survivor that really encompasses all of these psychological themes is that of giving form, or significance, or meaning to one's death immersion in order to give meaning and significance to the rest of one's life.

This is the survivor's search for form and meaning or his formulation of his experience. Now, Hiroshima had a very specific additional set of influences that I haven't described, and I want to just suggest these to you to convey my sense of Hiroshima totality of nuclear weapons in the background of all of our questions about war and peace.

In Hiroshima, people experienced, from that one moment, that split second of exposure to the atomic bomb, what I came to call a lifelong encounter with death over several stages. The first stage was the moment it fell and the dreadful scenes that they saw.

The second stage came days to weeks later with the outbreak of acute irradiation effects-- grotesque symptoms involving every system of the body, but especially the circulatory system, and often resulting in death. That was mysterious and seemed almost supernatural to them at the time.

The third stage had to do with the increased incidence of leukemia and certain other forms of cancer and other conditions, only slight statistically, but a definite increase in incidence among those significantly exposed to radiation, which, whatever its limited nature statistically, has an enormous psychological effect in maintaining death imagery over a lifetime for these people.

And fourth, the overall identity they developed as atomic bomb survivors, as a tainted population-- tainted by death or their being held to the dead constantly, what I came to call as an identity of the dead. They had to feel themselves, in many ways, almost as if dead, although still alive.

Now, in trying to overcome this and find meaning and significance in their experience, many of them sought expressions of peace or peace movement relationships so that they could find such significance for their ordeal. What they was seeking and what I think we all seek in our lifetime has to do with a connection with our biology and our history that I refer to as a symbolic sense of immortality.

We and they seek it over a number of modes. They're quite obvious, in a way. Biologically, we try to live on, not only through but in our children and their children and communities, as the biological becomes biosocial.

Religiously and theologically, the sense either of a life beyond death, or more fundamentally, perhaps, the sense of in some way confronting or even conquering death through spiritual attainment, which has been the basis for the creation of all religions and the model provided by the creator of each religion.

Third, by our works-- the sense that what we create will continue to live beyond our limited lifespan. And that may be great works of art, or science, or humble influences upon other people-- of a doctor on his patients, or a teacher on his or her students, or whatever.

Another mode is that of nature itself-- the sense of living on in eternal nature, which we sense survives us all. And all cultures provide imagery of this kind. And finally, there's a purely psychic mode-- that of experiential transcendence, that of psychic experience so intense that time and death disappear.

Part of what I think is happening to us in our culture now is that the existence of nuclear weapons, as well as other imagery of total annihilation, along with simply the velocity of historical change, have combined to render us uncertain about virtually all of these modes of symbolic immortality.

Who can believe that we will live on in our children, or in our works, or in some conquest or confrontation with death or life after death, or even in eternal nature, in something like a post-atomic world or a world in which nuclear weapons have been used? We know that even nature is susceptible to those weapons and to our pollutions.

And I think that it's the doubt about these modes that leads us to lean so heavily on a quest for transcendence. We need transcendence somewhere. We need connections beyond the self. And we often seek it through intense psychic experience, whether it's through drugs, meditation, or intensity in political and other social forms of activity.

Nonetheless, there are some malignant possibilities around the loss of a comfortable sense of continuity or symbolic immortality. And that has to do with the widespread numbing that I began to suggest.

But even worse than that is a tendency toward worship of technology and even worship of our technology of destruction-- a deformation I speak of as nuclearism, in which we begin to worship and see all kinds of not only godlike destructive capacity, but also unlimited capacity to create and save us in the very agents of our potential annihilation, the very weaponry. This would be the ultimate human heresy.

And war itself, of course, nuclear or conventional, has to do-- and this has been suggested, I think, by other speakers-- has to do, in this mode of thought, with a quest or a rather desperate need, in many cases, to reaffirm one's own collective sense of immortality as a nation or a people at the expense of an others. If one can create a victim who is death-tainted, who can lack that continuity or symbolic immortality, one can all the more strongly reaffirm one's own.

Well, with that overview of Hiroshima-- and it's a formidable one-- let's take a look at the psychology of the survivor around the Vietnam experience. And let me try to make it vivid by asking you to recall three scenes that I want to suggest to you, that some of you might have witnessed in one of our media or another.

The first is a gathering at the White House almost a year ago in which the president hosted most of the returning prisoners of war. Irving Berlin was there to lead the singing of "God Bless America," and Bob Hope's wife recited a prayer. In the speech the president made, he gave his most belligerent defense of his international and domestic programs and of his conduct in association with the Watergate scandal.

He issued, in effect, a call to reactivate the deadly romance of war-- its glory and so on-- and to salvage, insofar as that was possible, the synthetic romance of the Vietnam War-- the honor of American participation there, and what we achieved, and so on. The POWs were being used as the center of that call to rally the nation around a sense of immortalizing glory, and of course, around Mr. Nixon himself, all within the lowest common denominator of narrowly conventional nationalism and patriotism.

Now, the other two scenes that also illustrate modes of surviving Vietnam, as opposed to certain other wars, are the demonstrations of peace at the end of World War II and, in 1973, at the end of the American military involvement in Vietnam. In 1945, flashed recently on the television screens, were recollections of the scene at Times Square-- VE Day, the night of VE Day.

I was shown these film clips in connection with a television discussion that I participated in, and they were clips of pure mass joy, which I know to be authentic because I was there in that crowd as a 19-year-old medical student. And I might say, too, that I was not chagrined at the use of the atomic bomb.

I lacked the moral sensitivity to grasp what it meant. I was relieved, like I guess most other people, that the war was ending. And then I had a little second thought and a sense of awe when I read about the bomb and what it did. Maybe some of that stayed with me.

Contrast that with the scene in Times Square that also was shown on some television screens in 1973, at the time of the Accords in January-- January 27, I guess it was. A few Vietnam veterans gathered in anger, Times Square itself looking seedy, as it now has become, almost deserted. Some of the veterans drinking, others apparently on drugs, most simply enraged, screaming at the camera, at the society about having been deceived by the war and ignored upon coming back. One especially enraged Black veteran shouting, "You can tell that bastard the war isn't over."

These scenes suggest some of the survivor imagery now having an impact on American life. Now, in thinking about the POWs, one must begin with the assumption that even prior to their being received by the Pentagon and the administration, they have the survivor's need to try to give some significance to what they've been through, to their death immersion-- in this case, a twofold survival-- that of the war itself, their own combat in the war, and that of their period of imprisonment in Vietnam, which was indeed an ordeal.

The survivor formulation or significance for these men involves a struggle to find meaning in those lost years-- up to seven or eight years for some of them-- and to convince themselves and the country that there was some redeeming value in that experience. One way of claiming honor is to call forth a traditional definition of the socialized warrior, the kind of warrior cult that every culture creates, within which honor consists of standing up under pressures of imprisonment. And this approach has been emphasized.

I would stress not only the struggle of the POWs toward achieving significance in honor in their way of formulating their experience, but also the survivor mission a few of them took on in addition-- that of restoring national honor and pride in relationship to some kind of positive feeling about America's contribution to the Vietnam War.

Now, once one has said this about the genuine survivor struggle in these men who have, indeed, suffered and deserve sympathy that, I think, all veterans of this war deserve, all of them having been victimized by the war, Americans and Vietnamese, nonetheless, one must quickly add and emphasize the enormous embrace, orchestration, and manipulation of their survivor conflicts by the Nixon administration for political purposes.

The result is that the POWs were made into instant heroes-- probably the first war in human history in which the heroes of the war are the returning prisoners of war, so hungry were we for heroes in a war that produced no American heroes. The difficulty about this manipulation of the survival of the POWs, the malignant danger of it is that it also insists that we learn nothing from the Vietnam War and simply return to simple-minded glorification of the American version of the warrior ethos.

At the opposite pole are the antiwar veterans with whom I've worked for a period of about three years in rap groups in New York and, to some extent, in New Haven. And my work with these veterans has been simultaneously investigative-- psychological, that is-- and political. That is, I made a decision to join-- in fact, I already was in the antiwar crusade sometime before that-- while also working with them as an investigator, and in some sense, as a therapist because they were hurting, as they put it, and they wanted us-- the professionals who worked with them-- to help psychologically.

And I came to a position of advocacy investigation which does indeed try to combine the heart and the mind and try to illustrate that these are not antagonistic elements-- that, ideally, they should seek some harmony. And I felt a deeper relationship to my professional work, my scientific work as a psychiatric investigator, for embracing these ethical questions than perhaps I'd ever experienced in the past.

I want to describe some of the elements in their survivor struggle, at the other end of this continuum that I'm describing. And I want to briefly relate those two currents taking place in the United States in the '60s because these men are not isolated from the rest of American society.

The antiwar veterans, in contrast to the traditional veterans' survivor ethos-- and you may know that the ethos of the traditional veteran returning from war is to find his significance by glorifying that war and his role in it and often exaggerating with the war stories told with the help of a few drinks and as encouraged by chauvinistic veterans groups.

What the antiwar veterans have done, instead-- and this is what is historically so important-- is to seek their survivor significance by expressing the very absurdity of their war, to find meaning in revealing its meaninglessness. Their survivor mission becomes that of telling the truth about the war as they perceived it, no matter how unacceptable that truth has been to the American people.

As a grassroots effort by a significant minority of veterans of a war to oppose their war, while it's still being fought, they're unique in American history. Now, part of the truth as these men see it and part of the message as survivors they seek to convey is an understanding of the American presence in Vietnam as an atrocity-producing situation.

It was the norm in Vietnam. One was psychologically virtually required to commit atrocities. To avoid atrocities, one had to be exceptional. I was able to interview a man who had been at My Lai and who had not fired.

I spent 10 hours with him, much concerned about his experience about the whole My Lai event, which I was trying to reconstruct, but also trying to understand what had enabled him not only not to fire, but not to hide the fact that he didn't fire, as a few others felt compelled to do. A few others also did not fire but were afraid of group disapproval or even ostracism if that fact were known and hid that fact. He was very clear in public about not firing.

There are several elements in his life that I could come upon from my interviews with him. And I finally came to three very important reasons. And you'll see, they're not exactly the ones that a peacenik wants to hear. But part of one's commitment in this work is to be rigorous, intellectually, in one's investigative work, as well as-- looking for complexities, as well as concerned in one's antiwar passions.

The first element was that this man had been brought up with strict Catholic teachings. And although he had left formal Catholic religious involvement and rarely went to church, the teachings stayed within him, including, especially, imagery about limits beyond which one does not go. A second psychological factor was that he'd grown up as a loner, mostly off by himself, living by the ocean and was less susceptible to groups, including the combat group, than most others.

But finally, and perhaps the most important influence of all, he had kind of floundered prior to joining the military-- had enlisted and then found himself in the military, excelled at all training procedures, loved the military, planned to make it his career and his life. And when he got to Vietnam and especially to My Lai, he was appalled by what he saw as unworthy of military honor, as he had imagined it.

An important point, though-- and this is what I meant when I said earlier that, in some ways, the military has lost as much as any institution in American society around the Vietnam War and around issues of disillusionment, but he had to be, quotes, "maladapted" to the norm as it existed in that combat group in order to avoid firing at My Lai.

Guilt is very much a part of the survivor imagery of the antiwar veterans-- not guilt of the mea culpa kind, but rather what I have come to call an animating relationship to guilt which becomes a vital part of energy for transformation. Guilt has gotten a bad name in our culture, partly because of the excesses of premodern religion around guilt and partly because of the psychoanalytic cliche about simply getting rid of one's guilt-- analyzing it out, so to speak, as part of a process of cure and adaptation.

But guilt is a necessary human emotion. And what these men discovered was that their guilt could be energizing if they could confront it and its sources. And guilt then becomes the anxiety of responsibility.

Of course, they weren't seeking to take on all of the guilt, as much of the country would now like them to do. They were saying to the rest of the country, look what we did. Look what you did in sending us there. You better take a look at it, too. They wanted the country to share the guilt, which they had a hard time achieving.

Anger and rage are very much central to this survivor imagery. And we professionals in the rap groups decided we were not in a cooling role. It wasn't our task to cool their anger and rage, but rather to help them get to the source of their anger and rage, and in many cases, redirect it toward what they would find to be appropriate targets, and often against the war.

Incidentally, anger and rage are not necessarily war-making emotions. They can be alternatives to war. They are still verbal expressions, often necessary and often very useful. And of course, they tied in with the anger and rage all through American society during the '60s, just as the guilt I described tied in with the guilt and sometimes constructive guilt or animating relationship to guilt of many young, relatively affluent Americans-- guilt toward Blacks, third-world people, or towards the Vietnamese, which could be energizing toward change in themselves and toward further political activity.

The veteran survivor formulation also includes a fundamental political critique of spiritual authority in the society. And in the rap groups, I was quite impressed at the particular anger these men had for, as they call, the chaplains and shrinks. You know what chaplains are, and you probably know that shrinks is they're not always too-fond nickname for members of my profession.

I wondered why they were particularly-- they're angry at a lot of people. But I wondered why they were so especially angry at chaplains and shrinks, and what would come out would be a story something like this.

When some of them would experience a combination of moral repugnance and psychological pain-- and they can become inseparable at some point-- in combat in Vietnam, and they would seek out a psychiatrist or a chaplain, if they were fortunate enough to see one-- or unfortunate, as the case might be-- the chaplain of the psychiatrist would often help them to get over that feeling and remain at duty and to help them, in effect, in the daily commission of war crimes.

As these men felt, it's one thing to be ordered into combat under these circumstances. It's another thing to have one's very moral sensibilities undermined by those who represent ethical authority, whether spiritually or psychologically, in our society. And of course, this led me to a lot of thoughts about my own profession and about issues of professionals.

This has come up again and again during these talks, and perhaps a word about that now is in order, too. And looking at the usage, I look back at the usage of the word "professional." I wondered, how did we get to that point of ultimate corruption, which, of course, it was. And I'm not claiming to be any better than my colleagues who were there. I served in Korea and probably did similar things.

Professional originally, as many of you probably know, stems from religion. And during the Middle Ages, it meant something very close to confession-- profession of confession of faith, often in relationship to a religious order. Somehow, by the 18th century, it had come to mean acquisition of skill or profession of skill. By the 19th and 20th century, it has become almost totally associated with technical knowledge and technique.

So we've turned full circle from faith to technique. Now, I'm not advocating we go back to total premodern faith for the source of our professional-- or the expression of our professional lives, but rather that we at least take a look at the ethical component that we've lost and combine an ethical component, as professionals, and as I've been advocating on this podium, with our technique and our skills, which, of course, we still require.

And this, of course, again, was part of the struggles of the '60s on the part of a lot of people around just these issues. Another very important aspect of their survivor struggle had to do with what they called "the John Wayne thing." That was simply a euphemism for-- well, you probably can imagine-- a certain stance, or super maleness, or machismo, which they realized was inseparable from their relationship to the military, to military glory, and to war-making.

And once we had talked a great deal about the war, we probably talked more about these issues than anything else during the course of these rap groups-- male-female relationships, as they began to realize that extricating themselves from this particular image of maleness, which includes toughness, never showing weakness or sensitivity, not even aesthetic sensitivity, never even showing very much in the way of feeling as a man, and being loyal in an unquestioning way to one's group and what it tells one to do-- in this case, the military and the war-making or the society.

Now, it has some attractive elements, too, because it includes also courage and loyalty. But extricating themselves from this image of maleness which is emphasized by the culture and other cultures, too, they came to recognize as inseparable from their extrication from the war itself in the deepest personal way. And of course, that has enormous significance for the larger society. And that certainly connects very directly with many of the struggles of the women's movement.

Another part of survivor imagery had to do with struggles around what I've called the "gook syndrome," the need to victimize a nonwhite people or the relative ease with which one can victimize a people that is quite different from oneself. And of course, this had to do with struggles around these issues, again, during the '60s and the whole effort of third-world identification that is taking place in many parts of our society, especially among the young.

In all of these, they connected with these forces in American society rather than functioning in isolation. I saw taking place in these veterans a three-way transformation or three-stage transformation that I came to see this way-- first, confrontation, which really meant confrontation with dying in Vietnam-- one's own potential death, the death of one's buddy, or of one's alleged enemy.

The second stage was-- once one asked that question, whether it was worth dying, anybody dying in Vietnam, one was asking basic questions about the war and about oneself. The second stage was that of reordering, an inner reordering of emotions and feelings often around guilt and what I call an animating relationship to guilt.

The third stage is that of renewal-- a sense of new self, including, incidentally, the rediscovery of play and playfulness-- again, very much emphasized by youth culture during the '60s and part of what I've come to speak of as the protean style, after the notorious shapeshifter in Greek mythology, Proteus, the relative ease with which we can experiment with various immersions, identifications, beliefs these days, having a historical logic for reasons that I've already suggested.

Very much related to this transformation was a spirit of play, as I said, and of mockery and humor, which could be seen to emerge in these men or reemerge in them and, again, was very much part of what was going on in the '60s and often misunderstood. Mockery and humor are often central to the success of any antiwar or antiracial discrimination protest.

And I had lessons in that myself that I might share with you on a couple of occasions-- one of them when I, together with a group of fellow professionals-- writers, artists, university people-- decided to engage in civil disobedience so that we would share the experience with the young and our sense of responsibility.

Naturally, being intellectuals, we had elaborate reasons, which had to do with the First Amendment principle of the citizen's right to redress of grievances-- we went first to Congress and then to the Senate-- and also around what we took to be the Nuremberg obligation of individual citizens to resist the crimes, the war crimes of one's own government.

But in any case, we knew we were going to the House of Representatives. And we were going to sit outside the chambers, present our petition to the Speaker of the House, as we did, and we're going to insist they go into emergency session-- and would not leave until they did-- so that they could end the war. Well, you know what happened. We spent a night or two in jail.

But just before going off to the action-- and we knew that we would spend a night in prison or more for that-- somebody had had the wisdom to invite Dick Gregory to address us. And he could see us shaking in our boots. We were all scared. We'd never done anything like this. We were all brought up to obey laws.

And Gregory looked at us-- he's done this many times, of course. And he looked at us, and he said, you people look a little scared. He said, but don't be afraid. He said, the first time I did it-- I did civil disobedience, I was very scared. But you know what I did? I just found myself a couple of nuns, and I walked behind them.

[LAUGHTER]

There are many lessons in that. I guess it has to do with I said before about Christianity. The other thing he said in a similar spirit was-- he said, but look, he said, now, don't take this amiss. But I do want to just remind you middle-class white folk that this is one time you can't call the police.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

After that, the rest was easy. But I would seriously emphasize the enormous significance of mockery, humor, and play in this process. Now, it's probably true that most veterans and most Americans are somewhere in between these two ends of the continuum that I've laid out for you-- the POWs, or at least the prevailing view among POWs-- now, there are many dissenters among POWs, as well-- and the antiwar veterans. Although there are many, many veterans who are reluctant to express themselves publicly, just don't have anything to do with any groups or, certainly, the war, but who reverberate the antiwar veterans' message.

Most veterans I've spoken to, including those with no affiliations, feel a profound sense of betrayal-- the idea of having been, as the men say in their own, colorful language-- fucked over by the war. The war has had no satisfactory resolution for anyone. And yet, it's very hard for people to accept that kind of pain without its having some meaning.

And I remember the experience I had when testifying before a Senate subcommittee on the brutalization of GIs. And I met a triple amputee who testified quite articulately about struggles for medical care and also the doubts he and others had about whether the war was worth their sacrifice. And I spoke with him later, and he said-- I asked him about his future plans. He said he was going to run for political office in the Deep South. He was a very articulate person who I could believe could do this.

But I said, look, as a dissident, do you think you can run for political office? And he suddenly looked at me and said, I'm no dissident. I've got to believe there was some value in that war. He had lost so much. One could well understand that he had to believe it had some purpose.

And of course, that represents, I think, where many people in American society are. Can we come to believe that its purpose was illumination about the folly of war itself?

I had the chance to spend some time right after the ceasefire with a small number of these same antiwar veterans. And without going into detail about that experience, I would emphasize that they were depressed rather than cheered by the end of the war. And I think the mood of the country was a kind of relief but a sort of confusion and restlessness, as though it wasn't all quite right.

One of them said, very vividly, there was no sense of an ending. They also were rather enraged and had all sorts of memories of the war and antagonistic feelings toward the government. What enraged them most of all was the phrase "peace with honor" because, as one said, it isn't peace, and there's no honor.

But what they were really angry at was the sense that their mission of telling the truth about the war was being foreclosed because the manner of ending the war and the public declaration of peace with honor with the manipulation of the prisoners of war around that declaration was shutting out to the American people that message of the truth about the war. As one of them said, it was as if the door was closed.

Yet I don't think that door is completely closed. There's very much of a struggle still going on in society. One of the ways looking at the nature of that struggle is to ask whether society can look at its corpses-- it relates to what I said at the beginning of the talk-- of its own people and of its alleged enemy.

And of course, in that metaphorical sense, we have to ask here, in this kind of conference, whether any society is capable of looking at its corpses in connection with its survivor imagery of that war. The issue of amnesty becomes enormously important for this survivor meaning.

Now, amnesty will affect not only 100,000 or so young people numbered among resisters and exiles, but up to a half million people when you consider those who didn't have the intellectual or cultural equipment to seek that form of resistance or exile and had to desert or in some other way express their opposition to the war.

Now, amnesty, of course, means forgetting. It's the same root as "amnesia." But it would also, were it possible to achieve in a political sense, be a confirmation of the significance, indeed, of that survivor illumination that I'm talking about and of the moral worth of having resisted the war.

Well, I want to come back now at the end of my talk to some thoughts that I think are relevant for us about survival in terms of what I've been talking about. And we can look at survival and the whole issue at different levels. We can say that the human struggle is one of countering disintegration with some sense of form, inner form.

But form does not emerge smoothly. It doesn't flow uninterruptedly. It breaks down through into interruptions, endings, disruptions. And these breakdowns or deaths, large or small, all forms of death, are part of the irregular, asymmetrical process of the continuity of life.

In the face of these deaths, surrounding life aggregates either take on-- must take on the character of survivals, of elements or beings that have touched death and gone on living. My assumption is that the survival process, per se, is first physiological and then psychological and has significance on these many different levels.

And there's always a double possibility in survival experience of being weakened and held with all those psychological conflicts that I mentioned-- held to the death so that one lives as if dead or being strengthened by that process of survival. That may be true of a cell when another cell dies next to it. It certainly is true in various prehuman animals.

It can also be seen in various analogous ways in young human infants. And certainly, one can look upon the process of adolescence as the struggle to survive childhood and be reborn as an adult, a struggle that is often ritualized in certain societies, especially premodern societies. Certainly, all through adult life, one has a series of further survivals of friends, people close to one, people one has loved, as well as of ways of life or qualities of experience that no longer seem available.

Now, Vietnam seems to have been an unmitigated disaster for American society and for Vietnamese society. And yet, because it was such a bad war-- if I may use that phrase-- it may have something special, some special value in what it can teach us.

And incidentally, in terms of it being a bad war, you probably know about the intense generational conflict between veterans-- great difficulty getting along, veterans of Vietnam and veterans of World War II, who could believe in the necessity of their war, and quite understandably. And veterans of Vietnam sometimes identify more with veterans of World War I, whom they see as having suffered similarly from a war that combines slaughter and meaninglessness.

Now, the lessons that we can derive from Vietnam, that at least are potentially there for us, have to do with taking a hard look at the experience and its causes-- its nature and its causes. And the causes are, of course, political, historical, and have to do with some of the things that we've talked about-- Cold War imagery, the imagery of absolute American virtue and absolute communist depravity, but also the kind of technicism that I've begun to suggest to you which now involves these counterinsurgency wars, in which there's a notion of a job to be done by American know-how out there, which means stopping communism or whatever.

And by that technicist projection, you can eliminate 50 years of the Vietnamese revolution and thousands of years of Vietnamese history, not to mention the human nature of the Vietnamese people. But perhaps even more fundamentally in regard to the quest for peace, we have an opportunity for another and more critical look at the entire warrior ethos, at the myth of the warrior hero.

What isn't understood and what Joseph Campbell and his work makes clear is that the warrior hero in mythology uses his achievement and indeed his killing for the purposes of liberating, destroying the tyrant. And this is just simply one aspect of a hero deed equivalent to the spiritual hero. As Campbell says, the hero deed is a continuous shattering of the crystallizations of the moment. Transformation, fluidity, not stubborn ponderous deity is the characteristic of the living god.

The difficulty is that virtually every culture and nation embraces warrior hero mythology, makes it its own, and creates, and in a way, distorts it and narrows it into its own socialized warrior-- so we get a warrior class or caste in each culture, whether it's a samurai in Japan, the West Point graduate or the John Wayne pattern in the United States. Every country has one-- and then embraces the emotions around warrior hero mythology for its own narrow, secular purposes.

I think we've learned from the disillusionment surrounding Vietnam-- or at least there's the potential for learning, and the learning has begun-- to question, to be skeptical of such mythology and of the deadly romance of war surrounding it.

The antiwar veterans, as I suggested, came into an animating relationship to their guilt. The same is true of the group I called prophetic survivors-- those nuclear physicists who survived their holocaust, the bomb they made that was used to kill in such a grotesque fashion, by taking as their survivor mission that of telling the world about that weapon.

I would say that Alfred Nobel had a similarly animating relationship to his guilt in surviving his holocaust-- being related to a family and then an enterprise, making explosives and discovering a new one of greater and more destructive potential and the related wars and potential destruction that he could imagine.

It is this reason why Nobel Awards take on such significance-- because if one takes a look at the names of many people to whom they've been granted, these are people who have survived some kind of holocaust who have tried to bring illumination to their people to the world in survival-- Ralph Bunche, Albert Schweitzer, Philip Noel-Baker, Chief Luthuli, Dag Hammarskjöld, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King.

In that sense, the survivor mission that brings illumination is confirmed by the award, and symbolization of that sort can be transmitted through the generations in a way that enriches human culture and does that much more toward human survival and avoiding war.

Somebody asked me last night, being so critical of this year's Nobel Award for peace, who I would have given the award to if I had the chance. That was easy. I gave two possible choices that I'd like to suggest for the future.

One is the Berrigan Brothers, in terms of their contribution to peace, and the other, a group that a number of us have proposed, as a matter of fact-- collectively, the group of young Americans who have at great risk resisted fighting in this war--

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--either within or without the armed forces. Such an award would confirm a true quest for peace and would reflect the difficult political and ethical decisions that are required.

Well, it's really the writers and artists who can say these things much better than the rest of us. Saul Bellow, through his very gifted protagonist Herzog says, "We are survivors in this age, so theories of progress ill become us. To realize that you are survivors is a shock. At the realization of such election, you feel like bursting into tears."

And Herzog goes on to say, as he thinks about history's endless succession of wars, revolutions, and famines, "But," he says, "perhaps we, modern mankind-- can it be-- have done the nearly impossible-- namely, learned something."

And then, finally a couple of poets-- Theodore Roethke-- a line that has always haunted me that I come back to again and again and that has direct relevance to this concept of the survivor-- "In a dark time, the eye begins to see." And Richard Eberhart-- a recent poem called, appropriately, "The Young and the Old"-- "We are easy riders to the fields of grace, a bombshell in the gut."

And finally, on a note of joy, Gary Snyder-- "an owl winks in the shadow. A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard. The whales turn and glisten, plunge, and sound, and rise again, flowing like breathing planets in sparkling worlds of living light." Thank you very much.

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