Many of these young men who refused to serve in Vietnam or our Armed Forces during those years have been separated for long periods from their families, court-martialed, imprisoned, given dishonorable or bad conduct discharges, and generally victimized because of their beliefs. True, not all of these young men made mature decisions or took responsible actions based on sincere moral, ethical or religious convictions, but to deny them their feelings of frustration in confronting the insensibility of a bureaucratic system is to ignore reality.

It is doubtful that any procedure could be devised to separate the sincere men of principle from the insincere, the opportunists, or the cowards. This is an imperfect reality we should be strong enough to accept, and any inability to cope with our imperfection does not negate our necessity to act.

We dare not forget that a basic concept of Anglo-American law and justice recognized that to insure individual liberties, it is better that the guilty escape conviction than the innocent be unjustly punished. In addition, our brand of democracy demands that we accord a decent respect for the political and religious views of our fellow citizens.

If we persist in demanding a pound of flesh from those who could not, in good conscience, comply with a policy which to them demanded support of an undeclared, brutal war against the Indochinese people, then we have surely forsaken our country's traditional ideals of political and religious tolerance, and we are, at best, hypocrites.

Conditional amnesty or clemency is a contradiction, for it is essentially a demand for retribution; a punishment imposed by one faction on another. Therefore, far from being a sincere effort to forget and to heal the wounds of division, it is a deliberate attempt to remember while continuing to justify a specific point of view.

You know better than I the divisive bitterness that the Vietnam war imposed on our society. It continues to divide us, and cries for a solution. President Ford's clemency program is not a solution-unconditional amnesty is. Amnesty is not one-sided; it must, and does, apply to all Americans.

A Vietnam amnesty would apply equally to those Americans who opposed or supported the war and who may have committed crimes against our society or on humanity: Lieutenant Calley and many others: Presidents Johnson and Nixon; the 90 percent of the eligible young Americans who cleverly avoided service; the millions of Americans who actively protested our involvement in Vietnam in quasi-legal or illegal acts and demonstrations; political, social and religious leaders: relatives and friends who encouraged and supported our young men in their refusal to serve, and who may now find it expedient to advocate political compromise to a moral dilemma; the many Americans who did not know what was happening and did not want to become involved: Americans who did know, and refused to serve, and whose futures are still in jeopardy: and, of course, those Americans who trustingly served and gave their lives and limbs, and whose sacrifices and/or those of their families are quietly ignored.

Amnesty cannot grant justice, but amnesty can put an end to injustice and help to reunite our people.

For the last 2 years. I have been speaking before groups of fellow Americans, young and old, liberal and conservative, military and civilian; they overwhelmingly recognize a need for a broad-based un

conditional amnesty program. The myths espoused by those who oppose amnesty are seldom accepted today.

Most Americans I have talked to recognize the error of our involvement in Vietnam. Based on this fact alone, they see no justice in persecuting those who refused on moral, legal, or ethical grounds to support a Vietnam war policy. They see no threat in amnesty to our prestige in the world, to the military discipline or future of our Armed Forces, or to American patriotism. They see no threat to law and order in our society by a granting of amnesty. They are fed up with the emotional rhetoric of a few which tries to justify the continuance of our involvement in Vietnam, Indochina.

I am sure you know better than I that most Americans refuse to support continued military aid to Indochina. Americans overwhelmingly look to, and ask for, President Ford and the Congress to put an end to the fingerpointing, fault finding, and name calling which divides our people. It is legislative action, not political sidestepping, which will help to resolve this conflict amongst us. There will always be some dissatisfaction from dissident groups, but in a democracy, it is the will of the majority which should govern-not the voice of the few.

Amnesty will bring home our sons whose words and actions brought home the war-and the POW's. It will help to restore confidence in our institutions and our country's sense of righteousness and duty to its citizens. It will help to bring about social order out of political and moral decay. And it will help to restore our self-confidence and pride. Thank you.

Mr. KASTEN MEIER. Thank you, Colonel Miller. And now Mr. Condon, we have your statement. You may proceed, sir.

TESTIMONY OF GERRY CONDON ON BEHALF OF THE TORONTO AMERICAN EXILES ASSOCIATION

Mr. CONDON. Thank you. My name is Gerry Condon. It is my privilege to represent war resisters here today. I was not born or raised a war resister. I come from a conservative. Irish Catholic family. My father, both his brothers, and their fathers before them were all policemen, and veterans of the two World Wars. I was taught to respect God's law and man's. I was taught to love America, cherish its afluence, its freedoms, and its democracy. I was taught to hate and fear communism, the antithesis of America and all that was good.

I was troubled with doubts about the Vietnam war from fairly early on. But what did I know? Not enough to resist a war that was supported by my family. my church, and the Government to which I had learned to be loyal. I enlisted in the Army under pressure from the draft and eventually studied to be a Green Beret medic.

My worst suspicions about the war were confirmed by my experience in the U.S. Army. One day we were running around in formation. with our rifles and bayonets, yelling, "Kill the gooks; kill the gooks." and not much later I was reading letters from Vietnam in which fellow trainees told about atrocities they had perpetrated. From returned veterans I learned of the napalming and murder of unarmed civilians, the torture and murder of prisoners of war, the forcible use of civilians and POW's to clear minefields in front of the troops, and the policy of free fire zones and search-and-destroy missions. Somehow or other,

the commonplace commission of war crimes had become part and parcel of U.S. military policy in Indochina.

After 16 months in the Army, I announced publicly that because of my opposition to the war and the draft and to the limtied criteria allowed in granting conscientious objector status, I would refuse to do any further military service. The Army's response was to issue me five consecutive orders to begin preparing for Vietnam shipment. I refused. In February 1969, I took an unauthorized leave of absence from the Army in order to avoid a general court-martial and probable imprisonment. The trial was held in my absence, though; not even my lawyers were notified. I was convicted to 10 years at hard labor and a dishonorable discharge.

In Europe and Sweden, where I spent the first 3 out of my 6 years in exile, I talked to many people about the conflict in Indochina, and I studied its origins. I came to the inescapable conclusion that the Indochina war was an aggressive war being waged by a neocolonial power, America, against third world people who were tired of being dominated and exploited by other countries, and had organized themselves into strong popular movements for national liberation.

I read former President Dwight D. Eisenhower's own memoirs in which he quite openly stated that the United States would not allow democratic elections to be held in Vietnam in 1956, as was prescribed by the Geneva Accords of 1954. The reason, said the President, was that 80 percent of the Vietnamese people would have voted for unification of the country under a government headed by Ho Chi Minh, a Communist. In a speech while President, Eisenhower also mentioned the importance of the rubber, tin, and tungsten of Indochina; evidently it was easy access to these and other natural resources that justified America's stubborn refusal to allow another country to determine its own future.

But our national leaders have rarely spoken so candidly since; we have been told only of the domino theory and that we are fighting for democracy. But it is the corrupt dictator Thieu that the U.S. President and Congress have been supporting. And democracy has been sabotaged in the United States, as is documented in the Pentagon Papers, by consecutive U.S. Presidents who routinely deceived the American people about the nature of the Indochina conflict, and used the poor and the racial minorities of this country as cannon fodder in a rich man's war.

This appalling truth has compelled me to work against the continuing U.S. war in Indochina, and also for my right and the right of all war resisters to have their full civil liberties restored in the United States. During the last 6 years, I have worked with the American Deserters' Committee and the Center for American Exiles in Stockholm, Sweden, the Vancouver American Exiles' Association, and I am currently a member of the Toronto American Exiles' Association, and editor of AMEX/Canada, the publication of American war resisters in Canada.

At the risk of arrest, I returned to the United States at the beginning of February, and have been on a national speaking tour sponsored by the National Council for Universal and Unconditional Amnesty, a coalition which includes about 100 organizations nationwide, many of them national in scope.

Because I have so much support, the U.S. authorities have apparently decided not to arrest me yet, not wanting to risk the bad publicity of a highly visible example of punishment, when they are trying to convince people that their policy toward war resisters is one of clemency.

I have traveled around much of the United States and have talked to thousands of Americans. Virtually all of them have rejected the Vietnam war policy. Nobody thought I should go to jail. I feel I have received unconditional amnesty from the American people. The question now is whether or not this will be recognized by the President or the Congress.

I continue to be in touch with exiles and exile groups, as well as former draft and military prisoners, resisters underground in the United States, and many antiwar Vietnam veterans around the country, including some with punitive less than honorable discharges. Because of my experience and contacts, I can speak for the great majority of war resisters who have boycotted President Ford's socalled clemency program.

We believe that all persons who are being punished for their resistance to the Indochina war should have an unconditional amnesty. We believe that it is our unalienable right to resist unjust wars; that no draft or military laws can contravene the Nuremberg principles or the generally accepted principles of human morality.

The Presidential clemency program provided neither amnesty nor clemency. Those eligible for the program were further punished with stigmatizing clemency discharges, which allow for no veterans benefits, and alternative punishment sentences. Charles Goodell, the head of the Presidential Clemency Board, maintains that alternative service is not really punishment, but rather war resisters' "opportunity to serve their unfulfilled obligation to their country." War resisters cannot accept this line of reasoning. We know that the vast majority of drafteligible males legally evaded the draft and had to do no service, military or otherwise, to their country. Very often this was the case because their families had enough money to keep them in colleges and graduate schools; the burden of the war fell primarily on the poor. Besides, many war resisters applied 6 or 8 years ago to do alternative service, were flatly denied the opportunity, and were told they had no legal alternative to fighting in Vietnam."

It is too late now to offer us that alternative. We find it not only repugnant in principle, but extremely impractical in our already disrupted lives.

The President's earned reentry program was not only a deceptive and punitive program which tried to justify America's Indochina policy; it excluded the vast majority of nearly 1 million Americans who need amnesty. It excluded civilians who have felony records because of antiwar civil disobedience, and it made no provisions whatever for over half a million Vietnam-era veterans with less than honorable discharges, for other offenses than unauthorized absence. My own offense, for instance, refusing orders to Vietnam, was not covered under the so-called clemency program. Almost all these bad discharges went to poor and black Americans, the same people who bore the brunt of fighting in Indochina. Most often dissenting soldiers were not even given trials, but were administratively or arbitrarily given undesir

able discharges for offenses which would not be considered crimes in civilian life. Yet, they constitute lifetime sentences to discrimination on the job market, as well as a denial of veterans benefits, including medical care for vets who were wounded in Vietnam. Any real amnesty must upgrade all of these discharges to honorable discharges. And the discharge classification system itself, a repressive and discriminatory weapon in the hands of the military, should be totally scrapped and replaced by the institution of a single type discharge.

There is currently a bill before the Senate which would in essence reinstitute the clemency program with minor changes, and extend it indefinitely. I am told it was written by Charles Goodell and other members and staff of the Clemency Board and it has been introduced by Senators Nelson and Javits. War resisters vehemently oppose the passage of this bill as being unjust and foolish. Unjust because it also would exclude most who need amnesty and punish those who would be eligible. And most certainly it would be foolish to create a program with the same fundamental flaws which caused about 85 percent of eligible war resisters to boycott the President's earned reentry program.

There are several unconditional amnesty bills in Congress, most notably the Abzug bill in the House and the Hart bill in the Senate. But they are not universal, covering all categories of persons who need amnesty. Senator Hart's bill would provide unconditional amnesty only for those categories of resisters who were eligible for the Presidential clemency. It would leave primarily veterans in the lurch. The Abzug bill deals with veterans with bad discharges, but makes the serious mistake of putting many military offenses up for a case-by-case review, a procedure which would tend to discriminate against the less formally educated and the inarticulate, and give credence to the present discharge system.

War resisters would welcome the presence of a bill in Congress which we could support. But we will support no bill that does not amount to a universal and unconditional amnesty-that is, total amnesty for all war resisters.

In closing, it is important for me to point out our call for a universal and unconditional amnesty cannot possibly be separated from our demand that the U.S. Government stop supporting the isolated and unpopular Thieu regime in Saigon. Every significant sector of the people in South Vietnam, from the provisional revolutionary government to the Buddhists and the Catholics, have called for Thieu's removal, denouncing him as the one largest obstacle to peace and reconciliation in their war-torn country. Yet. President Ford has cynically twisted the truth again, calling for $1 billion for Thieu as the only hope for peace in Vietnam.

Congress has rubberstamped the maneuvers in Indochina of a string of U.S. presidents. It is high time that Congress separated itself from this criminal policy once and for all. By voting against the billion dollar supplemental, you will be voting for a halt to the daily bloodbaths in Vietnam.

Also, in order that we avoid another Tonkin Gulf type incident, it is extremely important that Congress call for an immediate evacuation of American citizens from Saigon. In this way it will be unnecessary for that inevitable evacuation to become a major military maneuver.