<Begin Segment 22>

TI: And prior to getting civilian counsel, legal counsel, was there anyone that you could talk to about this?

EW: I talked to the unit chaplain for a little bit, and he was a man who was in Tiananmen Square in China, and so I thought he would kind of understand. And when I talked to him after this whole incident, he did understand that what I was standing up against was the same thing he stood up against in Tiananmen Square. But in any case, he was imprisoned after Tiananmen, he was reeducated.

TI: So he was Chinese?

EW: He was a Chinese national who became an American citizen.

TI: Oh, interesting.

EW: He came back to, he was able to come to America, joined the army and he became a chaplain. But initially when, initially when I talked to him, he did not understand, I think, where I was coming from. He just simply said, "Well, a long life, you have all these different things that come at you, and you just have to think about what your goal is." And I did talk to one of the base counselors, and they weren't very helpful at all. They said, "Well, it appears you have some kind of dichotomy going on here, and that you have a choice to make," and other than that, they didn't offer much of a solution. And I'd even talked to one of the JAG officers, and he strongly recommended, he said, "They're going to hit you hard because you're an officer, and you can try to be a conscientious objector, but you have to be really strong in your beliefs and you have show a history of being a pacifist or being part of a religion, a pacifist religion." I said, "Well, who would join the military if they were?" So he didn't really offer me other solutions either.

TI: And so when you got civilian legal counsel, what, what kind of advice did you get then?

EW: He said that he would talk with the, the unit commander, my commanding officer, and he would talk to the JAG lawyers and try to negotiate something short of this confrontation that we would have. And this was back in April of '03, three or four months, about three months before I came out publicly.

TI: So not April of '03, it'd be April...

EW: Oh, I'm sorry, April of '06.

TI: '06.

EW: Sorry.

TI: Yeah.

EW: And so he talked with them, and they were very defensive, very adamant that they weren't going to negotiate anything. They said simply, "If he's not going to go, then we're going to prosecute him." And so they took that pretty hard line stance almost the whole, well, up until now.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.