ON OCTOBER SIXTEENTH, Ferguson and Amy took part in their first anti-war demonstration, a march organized by the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee that attracted tens of thousands of people ranging from Maoist student activists to Orthodox Jewish rabbis, the largest crowd either one of them had ever been in outside of a baseball or football stadium, and on that bright Saturday afternoon in early fall, under the perfect blue skies of a perfect New York day, as the marchers headed down Fifth Avenue and then turned east toward U.N. Plaza, some of them singing, some of them chanting, most of them walking in silence, which was how Ferguson and Amy chose to go about it, holding hands and walking side by side in silence, throngs of non-marchers sat on the low perimeter wall of Central Park applauding or shouting out encouragement, while another faction, the pro-war faction, the ones Ferguson eventually came to think of as the anti-anti-war people, shouted insults and abuse, and in several instances threw eggs at the marchers, or ran into the crowd and punched them, or doused them with red paint.
Two weeks later, the pro and anti-anti forces staged their own march in New York City on what they called Support America’s Vietnam Effort Day as twenty-five thousand people walked past a contingent of elected officials who cheered them on from elevated viewing stands. Few Americans were willing to concede the errors of their government’s war at that point, but with one hundred and eighty thousand U.S. combat troops now posted in Vietnam and the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder in its eighth month, with American units on the offensive and G.I. death counts coming in from battles at Chu Lai and Ia Drang, the swift and inevitable victory that Johnson, McNamara, and Westmoreland had all promised the American public seemed less and less certain. In late August, Congress had passed a law fixing a penalty of five years in prison and up to ten thousand dollars in fines for anyone convicted of destroying Selective Service documents. Nevertheless, young men continued to burn their draft cards in public protests as the Resist the Draft movement expanded across the country. One day before Ferguson and Amy marched down Fifth Avenue, three hundred people had gathered in front of the Armed Forces Induction Center on Whitehall Street to watch twenty-two-year-old David Miller put a match to his draft card in the first open defiance of the new federal law. Four other young men attempted to do the same thing at Foley Square on October twenty-eighth and were engulfed by a mob of hecklers and police. The following week, when five others were about to burn their draft cards during a demonstration at Union Square, a young anti-anti jumped out from the crowd and sprayed them with a fire extinguisher, and once the five drenched boys managed to ignite their sodden cards, hundreds of people standing behind the police barricades shouted, “Give us joy, bomb Hanoi!”
They also shouted, “Burn yourselves, not your cards!” an ugly reference to the anti-war Quaker pacifist who had burned himself to death four days earlier on the grounds of the Pentagon. After reading an account by a French Catholic priest who had seen his Vietnamese parishioners burned up in napalm, thirty-one-year-old Norman Morrison, the father of three young children, drove from his house in Baltimore to Washington, D.C., sat down not fifty yards from the window of Robert McNamara’s office, poured kerosene over his body, and immolated himself as a silent protest against the war. Witnesses said the flames rose ten feet into the air, an eruption of fire equal in force to that caused by napalm when dropped from a plane.
Burn yourselves, not your cards.
Amy had been right. The small, almost invisible disturbance called “Vietnam” had grown into a conflict bigger than Korea, bigger than anything since World War Two, and day by day it was continuing to grow, every hour more troops were being sent to that remote, impoverished country on the other side of the world to fight the menace of communism by preventing the North from conquering the South, two hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand young men from Ferguson’s generation shipped off to jungles and villages no one had ever heard of or could locate on a map, and unlike Korea and World War II, which had been fought in places thousands of miles from American ground, this war was being fought both in Vietnam and at home. The arguments against military intervention were so clear to Ferguson, so persuasive in their logic, so self-evident after a thorough scrutiny of the facts that it was difficult for him to understand how anyone could support the war, but millions did, many more millions at that point than the millions who opposed it, and in the eyes of the pro and anti-anti forces, anyone who objected to the policies of his government was an agent of the enemy, an American who had given up the right to call himself an American. Every time they saw another dissenter risk five years in prison by burning his draft card, they yelled out traitor and commie scum, whereas Ferguson looked up to those boys and considered them to be among the bravest, most principled Americans in the country. He was all in behind them and would march against the war until the last soldier came home, but he could never be one of them, never stand next to them because of the missing thumb on his left hand, which had already spared him from the threat his fellow students would be facing once they finished college and were called up for their physicals. Defying the draft was not a job for the maimed or the handicapped but for the fit, the ones who would qualify as good soldier material, and why risk going to prison on the strength of a meaningless gesture? It was a lonely spot to be in, he often felt, as if he were an exile who had been exiled even from the exiles, and consequently there was a sense of shame attached to being who he was, but like it or not the car crash had exempted him from the future battle of whether to resist or abscond, he alone among his acquaintances did not have to live in fear of the next step, and surely that helped him stay on his feet during a time when so many others lost their balance and fell, for the country had already split in two by September and October 1965, and from that point on it was impossible to say the word America without also thinking of the word madness.
We had to destroy the village in order to save it.
Then, on November ninth, one week after Norman Morrison’s suicide on the grounds of the Pentagon, roughly six weeks into Ferguson’s first semester at Columbia, when he was still feeling his way forward and not yet sure whether college was all it had been cracked up to be, the lights went out in New York. It was 5:27 P.M., and within thirteen minutes an area covering eighty thousand square miles of the northeastern United States had lost electrical power, leaving more than thirty million people in the dark, among them eight hundred thousand New York City subway riders on their way home from work. Unlucky Ferguson, who seemed to have perfected the art of being in the wrong place at the wrong time by then, was alone inside an elevator traveling upward toward the tenth floor of Carman Hall. He had gone back to his dormitory to drop off some books and change into a heavier jacket, but he hadn’t been planning to spend more than one minute in his room, since he and Amy were supposed to begin cooking their spaghetti dinner in her apartment at six o’clock, after which he would be reading a history paper she had finished that afternoon, fifteen pages on the 1866 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, an editorial service he provided each time she wrote a paper because it always made her feel better, she said, if he looked over her work before she handed it in. Then they were going to sit on the sofa in the living room together for a couple of hours catching up on their assignments for tomorrow’s classes (Thucydides for Ferguson, John Stuart Mill for Amy), and after that, if they were in the mood, they would walk up Broadway to the West End Bar for a beer or two, perhaps talk to some of their friends if any of them happened to be there, and once they had had enough of sitting in the bar, they would go back to the apartment for another night in Amy’s small but deliciously comfortable bed.