ustxtxb_obs_1970_08_07_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

Democratic national conventions. They could just smile and ask, ‘What are you going to do with us?’ You see, the problem is not just Vietnam but a hundred more Vietnams on the way. If we don’t stop the military now, we’ll end up murdering the whole world. “Daddy Warbucks capitalism is over with. And we’ve got to realize that. The best thing we can hope for in these developing nations is democratic socialism and we’ve got to help that come about. If we keep killing instead, we’re going to push them into a Stalinist-type communism and it’ll be the Democratic Party that does it.” By the same logic, Maverick also opposes a volunteer military. According to him, it would “mean that instead of becoming the incipient new Nazis of the world, we would become just plain out and out Nazis. A conservative friend who is a professor recently told me ‘we want a volunteer army just like you liberals do.’ He said that in the future we’ll have to go into more places like Cambodia and the Dominican Republic, and that a draft army just wouldn’t be gung-ho enough to win. He said it’ll be a matter of survival. Well, hell, if he’s right, I don’t know how important it is to survive. “I take considerable solace in the knowledge that in a draft army you have loud-mouth, bellyaching Private Ronnie Duggers raising hell, writing their congressmen, going to court, and telling the army to go screw itself. There may not be a lot of hope with them, but there would be none without them.” MAVERICK SAYS the way “to get the Duggers into the army” is to do away with the II-S student deferment. As he sees it, abolishing the four-year educational reprieve is the key to stopping the war. He reasons that putting an end to the university haven would bring Vietnam’s horror home to America’s middle and upper classes, which so far have been able to buy their sons’ safety with college tuition. According to Maverick, extending the draft equitably across all social strata would jolt the silent majority into exercising its collective vocal cords. Spiro’s fan club would start yelling for peace, too, he says. “If at midnight, when the dead soldiers’ bodies roll into San Antonio from the West Coast if those coffins started rolling into the well-to-do sections of the city, that’s when you’d see the war end. You see, all the protest up to now has come from the middle class. Although the average white isn’t affected nearly as drastically as the poor, the black or the chicano, he has the education to know when he’s getting screwed and how to fight back,” Maverick theorizes. Consequently, he says the way to hike the protest volume is to spread a fair share of the war burden over more of 12 The Texas Observer Maury Maverick, Jr those whites who have a suburban home with two cars in the garage. Trying to involve poor Mexican-Americans and blacks in war resistance by convincing them of draft discrimination is largely ineffective, he says. To both minority groups, the problem of Vietnam is remote and unreal, according to Maverick. He says: “Blacks and chicanos are having too much trouble just surviving to worry about peace. Besides, they say the army gives them a better standard of living and more democracy than they get in civilian society. That’s a damned sad commentary, isn’t it?” Old-fashioned ideas about proving one’s manhood also confuse the issue, Maverick says. He calls the chicanos “the biggest dopes in Texas because they don’t understand the patriotism hoax the establishment is playing on them.” According to him, the Mexican-Americans on San Antonio’s West Side are taken advantage of by military propagandists who play on the chicanos’ traditional concept of family honor. Lest the false impression be created that Maverick feels draft-age chicanos should be neglected while war dissent is fomented among middle class whites, it is necessary to mention his close cooperation with San Antonio’s draft counselors. Three young resisters, all about half Maverick’s 50 years, run a store-front operation two blocks from the attorney’s office. Maverick has defended two of them in court one on a C. O. application and the other against a charge of trespassing on a military base. The playful verbal jibing that goes on among them is evidence of the affection and respect they hold for each other. The liberal Maverick speaks of former VISTA volunteer John Dauer as a “truly non-violent, peaceful person.” The radical Dauer praises the help “Mr. Maverick” has been to him and others. On Maverick’s office wall hangs a framed thank-you letter from Dauer testimony to the successful two-year struggle to keep Dauer out of the American eagle’s claws. Dauer and his cohorts concentrate their counseling effort among San Antonio’s poor, chicanos and blacks. When a white comes to them for answers to his draft problems, they respond. But they do no spend their time hunting middle class draft-eligibles to advise. They believe that most whites have more than adequate access to lawyers and counselors. Their reasoning is a simple sort of economics allocating one’s resources where the need is greatest. Immediate profit is not their motivation. If it were, they might be too discouraged to continue. Despite repeated efforts to awaken an anti-draft consciousness among San Antonio’s Mexican-Americans, Dauer and friends have met little success. Last spring they mailed out 800 letters to graduating chicano high school students; included was an interview with a Mexican-American ex-Marine who said he would not volunteer again unless he was “starving to death.” According to Dauer, only about 25 chicanos responded to the offer of free draft advice. Still, the number was no surprise, he says. He explains it in terms straight from Maverick’s vocabulary: “The poor just don’t have the free time to sit around and intellectualize abstract peace-war ideas. Chicanos have to deal with the gutty issues of life in their daily struggle to survive. What political effort they put forth is channeled through the Mexican-American Youth Organization and MAYO doesn’t regard Vietnam as one of their most pressing concerns. “What we have to do at this stage is not draft counseling, but draft education,” he says. “For example, we have to show MAYO how ROTC in the West Side high schools not only makes army recruitment easier, but also how it ruins the educational atmosphere. We have to convince the individual chicano that he’s being discriminated against in the draft. We have to fight the fatalism that accompanies the idea of ‘serving one’s country.’ We have to show these people that you don’t have to go kill and be killed that there are other alternatives.” DAUER UNFURLS rolled-up maps of San Antonio to illustrate his contention that chicanos are discriminated against in the draft. The ink representation of the city is divided into draft board sections, and Dauer immediately points to an incriminating statistic only one Mexican-American serves as a board member. That man was appointed as a result of his and the other resisters’ political agitation. Then Dauer’s index finger traces a line around the West Side and hesitates momentarily on a few of the red crosses that make the map look like a Florence Nightingale memorial. “These are the chicano dead,” he says solemnly. “One of the San Antonio newspapers printed statistics that showed