Mennonite Church Peace Resources for Youth

Being in the U.S. Army was a strange place for me to be as a young person from 1969-1971. I completed 6 weeks of basic training at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas and continued there in AIT (Advanced Individual Training). For 12 weeks I was trained as a medic, one of the options for a conscientious objector who enters the military.

The advanced training involved learning to give each other shots (ouch! with first timers even!), and yourself a morphine shot (for personal wounds), take a person's temperature (by mouth and yuuuuck, rectal!) move someone into and out of a bed, bandage a wounded vet (how to pile their guts on top of them and cover them), watch films of wounded soldiers (worse than slasher movies!), find your way back to base in the mountains with a map and compass, and other skills to keep yourself alive in Vietnam.

As the days and months of training passed I got more and more nervous about finishing and being sent over to Southeast Asia with no weapon and a red cross on my helmet for a target. I remember the early morning after AIT was over and all the men in my company stood in formation ready to hear their orders of transfer, where they were going to be sent. You could almost feel the grimacing as each soldier's name was being read alphabetically. Hampton…Fort Benning, Georgia…Hansen…Fort Bragg, South Carolina…Hartshorn…I was ready to hear my death sentence of "Vietnam"… Hartshorn…Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Surprisingly, not one person in my company was sent to Vietnam, at least at that time. They had their quotas of medics for the year. But, I suspect the some of those names called out that morning can now be found etched in stone on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.

After being trained as a medic I never saw a drop of blood in my two years in the U.S. Army. I was stationed in Augusta, Georgia and ended up working in the army pharmacy, because they didn't have enough trained pharmacy assistants. I filled bottles with cough syrup and helped dispense medication to soldiers and their families. I do remember having to face the ridicule of some of the other army pharmacists for being a conscientious objector. I tried to defend what I believed. Sometimes I just let what they said roll off my back. What an odd place for a conscientious objector to be!

Sometimes young people, particularly those who believe in peace and nonviolence, may find themselves in places they would rather not be, like being approached by an army recruiter at your high school, considering going into the military to get an education or to travel, or having to defend your pacifist beliefs to another Christian. Believing in a nonviolent Jesus in a world where adults justify and wage war and young people are saturated with the myth of redemptive violence (in videos, movies, attitudes) is a strange place to be as a peacemaker.

Maybe it's God's grace that sometimes gets you through the pressure to conform or give in to violence. Other times you just have to let what others say about what you believe roll off your back. Then, at other times you have to stand up for what you believe, even when your whole environment is out of sync with the Jesus who called us to love our enemies.

Leo Hartshorn

Minister of Peace and Justice

Mennonite Mission Network