May 7 marks exactly a month since I packed the small red bag I had bought in Hanoi, and set out from Cornell, looking for America. So far, it has been a tougher and longer voyage than the one which set me down in North Vietnam some two years before. In the course of that month, I have changed domicile some six times; this in strict accord with a rule of the Jesuit Order, making us, at least in principle, vagabonds on mission; 'It is our vocation to travel any place in the world where the greater glory of God and the need of the neighbor shall impel us.' Amen, brothers ....
For at least the past six months, when jail was becoming a nearer and larger threat, the students with whom I worked for three years, and for whom my decision most incredible apparitions of evil mankind has witnessed within the last half-century, in this nation, as well as others, convince us there are moments when force must be met with force. Nor do we believe there is nothing at stake in Southeast Asia .... The outcome in Southeast Asia will make a difference. But not the decisive difference needed to justify a war which may last longer than any America has ever fought, employ more U.S. troops than in Korea, cost more than all the aid we have ever given to developing nations, drop more bombs than were used against the Japanese in World War II, and kill and maim far more Vietnamese than a Communist regime would have liquidated--and still not promise a definite outcome. The disproportion between ends and means has grown so extreme, the consequent deformation of American foreign and domestic policy so radical, that the Christian cannot consider the Vietnam war merely a mistaken government measure to be amended eventually but tolerated meanwhile. The evil outweighs the good. This is an unjust war. The United States should get out ....
Berrigan . . . seemed to be of some import, said to me time and again, with imploring; when they come for you, don't go in! The festival at Cornell offered a delicious opportunity, too good to let pass. Some 10,000 students had come together for a post-Woodstock festival of arts, politics, communal living, all in honor of non-violence and Catonsville. Such a gathering, it seemed to me, must not be taken lying down, lost in wondering admiration. According to certain presumptions, mainly of university officials, (whose relief was guarded, oblique, but in the air) I was indeed going to jail. But those to whom 'I was responsible, in the church and the resistance, had other urgings, rarely expressed, often legible in faces and eyes. Would I be inventive on the night, open to other voices, other directions?
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