<Begin Segment 22>

AI: So it sounds like you had quite a variety of experience at these three institutions. And as you had been warned ahead of time, you did have to make those choices on how you were going to behave and get through it. Let me ask you one question that occurred to me is that you commented on many times, the cordial treatment that you received outside of the Terre Haute experience. And that's curious to me because at the time the Vietnam War was becoming very contentious, and the U.S. was...

PI: Losing.

AI: ...losing. And I'm surprised that you, as someone who would be perceived as a draft resister, a "draft dodger" in the terms of that time, that you would receive such cordial treatment from people who were in this criminal justice system, who might...

PI: Well, actually that wasn't always the case. For example, when I was first sent to Danbury, Connecticut, which was known as a white-collar prison, the closest federal prison in New York City, a lot of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, white-collar criminals who were sent there, mostly older. A lot of Mafia members, in fact, were sent there who, for federal income tax violations and things. And they were all non, it was a medium security prison, not a bad place to do time. But one thing, when I first got there I was put in a cubicle with another inmate, an older guy. And somehow he found out, and I don't think I told him, but he found out that I was a draft resister. Well, he claimed to be a survivor of the Bataan Death March in World War II. I don't know if that was true or not. But, at any rate, he became extremely agitated and threatened to injure me. And, in fact, I had to go to the prison authorities and say, "I'm being threatened." And he was eventually moved and sent to another prison.

But one of the interesting things about Danbury at that time, and this was in 1968, '67 and '68, and -- I remember Dr. King was assassinated while I was in Danbury, and they locked down the whole prison and separated all the white inmates and all the black inmates which they hadn't done before -- was that almost without exception the black inmates and the Hispanic inmates were very much opposed to the war for the very simple, obvious reason that they were the ones getting killed, disproportionately, in Vietnam. And they saw it as a white people's war against colored people. And this was the time when Muhammad Ali made his famous statement. He went to prison for violating the draft. And Muhammad Ali made the statement, he said, "No Vietcong ever called me 'nigger'" And so there was polarization even within the prison. I remember the white prisoners in a state prison in Louisiana all signed a petition volunteering to go to Vietnam and fight as a way to get out of prison.

And there was one episode -- I'll just tell this one story about prison. Every Saturday night they showed a movie in the cafeteria. And the inmates would segregate themselves pretty much by race. Not rigidly, but the whites would sit in the front, the blacks behind them and the Puerto Ricans and others in the back. I usually sat in the middle section. Well, one of the movies they showed was the Green Berets starring John Wayne. And there's a scene in the Green Berets -- movie about the war in Vietnam -- where the Green Berets, the elite army troops, come swarming into this Vietcong village in helicopters. They blow everybody away on the ground with their machine guns from the helicopters, jump out of the helicopters, run over, pull down the Vietcong flag, which was flying in the village, and run up the American flag. And at this point in the movie, all the white inmates erupted in cheers. And then, or earlier in the movie -- I got this backwards -- but earlier in the movie, the Vietcong overrun one of the American bases, and the black and Hispanic inmates all cheered. So when John Wayne came storming back to raise the American flag, and at that point they shut down the movie. The guards realized that there might be a riot. And they shut down the movie. We never saw the end of that movie because there was so much racial polarization over the war. And that, it brought home to me what I'd already known, but many people don't realize is that this really was a war about race. That the whole way Americans thought about and talked about and treated the Vietnamese, you know, they were all "slopes" and "gooks" and "slant-eyes." A lot of the resistance within the military to the war in Vietnam came from black and Hispanic soldiers who suddenly realized that they were being sent to kill other "colored" people, and this was something they didn't want to do or couldn't do.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.