Americans Who Tell the Truth: Doug Rawlings

“I was drafted in 1968 and after sixteen weeks of so-called training, I was shipped out for Viet Nam. I felt like a piece of meat … to be used by others to achieve their ends. I don’t remember anyone asking their permission to use me.”

Remarks at the unveiling of Doug Rawlings’ portrait in the”Americans Who Tell the Truth” series by Rob Shetterly.

 

Doug Rawlings, veteran, peace activist, teacher, poet, and cofounder of Veterans for Peace, has dedicated his life to abolishing war through nonviolent resistance and diplomacy. His contributions, deeply rooted in personal experience, continue to make an impact on the peace movement through the intersection of military experience, activism, and creative expression.

First-generation American and Rochester, NY, native, Rawlings didn’t volunteer to fight in Vietnam. In fact, believing that graduate school would provide him with a draft deferment, he enrolled in an MBA program at Ohio State University. The military summarily disagreed and ordered him to report to his draft board in Buffalo, NY.

With that order, Rawlings faced an existential choice that would deeply affect him and many thousands of other young men for the rest of their lives: report for duty; defy the draft and face five years in jail; or leave the country. Initially, Rawlings considered the final option. His parents had emigrated from Canada, and he could have dodged the draft by crossing the border into Toronto, “where many relatives would have welcomed me into their homes.” Rawlings recalls being despondent and dispirited, not wanting to join a war for which he felt no connection, “. . . but ultimately I didn’t want to embarrass my family and be perceived as a coward. Only later did I realize that by obeying the draft I was giving up my moral autonomy and that made me the coward.”

Rawlings fell in line and was drafted into the U.S. Army on January 9, 1969. Six months later, he was deployed with the 7th Battalion 15th Field Artillery Regiment supporting the 173rd Airborne in the Vietnam central highlands. Reflecting on his service, he says, “I quickly got out of that notion they like to give you in the military that you’re going to become a man. Like you’re playing in your own little sandbox and not affecting anybody. . . . I was not a warmonger in Vietnam, but when things got scary, we were going to protect each other no matter what, and if that included killing another human being, so be it. I say to young people: ‘That is the baggage you will carry with you for the rest of your life. When you wear that uniform you give up your moral autonomy; you are a tool of that machine.”’

Thirteen months in Vietnam left Rawlings an angry man. Upon returning home, he recognized that the life his family expected him to lead (law school and a corporate career) no longer fit the person he had become. Setting out to discover a different path, Rawlings and his new wife Judy landed in Boston where he took part in anti-war activism and earned a Masters in Teaching English, hoping to redirect his unrest by connecting with young people. He recalls, “. . . to say I was confused and angry and lost is an understatement…. I was angry about what we had done to the Vietnamese people, children in particular. These Vietnamese kids would look at us with the coldest eyes. I could not stop thinking about it. . . . I just kept on saying, I can do this, I can put it behind me. But I couldn’t.” Then he discovered poetry.

One night in a Cambridge bookstore he came across a collection of poems by Denise Levertov that captured her journey to North Vietnam as a peace activist. He says, “. . . that was my first introduction to political poetry and the first serious ‘discussion’ about ‘my’ war.” He saw how Levertov used the personal to open up the universal. He was captured, and unlike his military service, he didn’t want to escape. Rawlings began writing his own poems, and soon they were finding an audience in anthologies of political poetry. Poetry became the form through which he could contain, investigate, and express his own rage, sadness, and confusion about his Vietnam experience. As of September 2024, he has edited three books of letters and authored five books of poetry, including the recently published Cầu Tre (Bamboo Bridge), a collaboration with poet and Vietnam War refugee Teresa Mei Chuc.

Poetry also provided a forum to connect with others, and for many years he held writing workshops with veterans. He notes, “I really do believe that writing about feelings and experiences and reading other veterans’ poetry can help heal the moral injuries that hinder our healing. I believe that we can actually set aside those war experiences to some extent and use them instead of them using us.”

Rawlings‘s poems express both the cathartic and revelatory. His words provide a visceral context to dismember the mythology of combat and war. In “Unexploded Ordnance: A Ballad,” from his book A G.I. in America, he reveals how in war one is culpable for injuring so many in so many different ways, and we come away suffering a deep moral injury that will not recede: “. . . they whipped me into some kind of soul-less shape . . . how could I possibly believe I could do what I did and not reap what I had sown.”

In 1985, Rawlings was living in rural Maine where had found a renewed sense of self through teaching English and writing at the University of Maine Farmington. He was also working with a group of Vietnam veterans who were concerned that Central America would become another Vietnam. As an anecdote to that fear, they founded the nonprofit Veterans for Peace. He comments, “We’re not anti-military. We just want to demythologize military service, set up a defensive military, and address war’s underlying causes: the war industry, the munitions industry, and the people who are invested in war. Ultimately we are committed to working to abolish future wars, to stop the killing of innocents.” Today, Veterans for Peace is a prominent player in opposition to war as an instrument of foreign policy with thousands of members, chapters in every state, and six international affiliates. Rawlings serves as president of the Maine chapter. Now retired from teaching English but still passionate about educating young people about the untruths that our country tells us about military service, Rawlings continues to teach a Peace Studies seminar.

Rawlings believes that it’s the art form (painting, music, or poetry) that can make a difference in the peace movement and help others understand the full price we pay for war. “We’ve over-intellectualized this whole process and want to talk in the abstract about war. It doesn’t work, not for me anyway. . . . It is not the preacher in a church, preaching to you, it is not an essayist lecturing you, it’s a person making him or herself vulnerable through the art form. Saying here I am. Here is who I am. Here is what I was trying to do. Please join me. You don’t have to necessarily agree with me, but please see if you can join me. I believe that’s what the arts can do. It seeps into who you are in a somewhat comfortable zone and helps you gather the courage to act for what you believe.”