As a participant in one of the first group actions against Vietnam War-era draft files, I’d like to comment on “Hit & Stay,” the documentary by Joe Tropea and Skizz Cyzyk that just screened at the Maryland Film Festival.

Tomorrow, May 17, is the 45th-year anniversary of the action that kicks off the film: the burning of draft files by the Catonsville 9.

I was in an earlier action, known as the Baltimore 4. In 1967, we poured blood on Selective Service files at the Baltimore Custom House to protest the Vietnam War (for which I spent 21 months in federal prison). It’s covered in the movie.

We weren’t the first to attempt such a thing. In Minnesota, Barry Bondhus and his family dumped shit on draft records and, since they didn’t try for media coverage, aren’t so well-known.

Anyway, I was happy to see that “Hit & Stay” played to sell-out crowds of approximately 400 in each of its two Baltimore screenings. At both showings, the movie was followed by a question-and-answer period featuring not just the two film makers, but persons who were in the movie as well.

Fully expecting an amateurish work, I was pleasantly surprised by the overall professionalism – enough so that I think we could hope for some wide distribution or even airing on PBS or other more established venues.

All of us participants learned a great deal about the other actions previously known only in fragmentary fashion. To have big appreciative audiences as well as friends present to watch the film was very moving.

Shredding Draft Cards into Confetti

I know this film has been discussed in The Brew, but just to recap: six years in the making, the 100-minute documentary is about anti draft board actions to protest the Vietnam War.

Beginning with the Baltimore Four, the movie progresses through the Catonsville Nine and Milwaukee 14 to many other actions. There were 120 or so in all – including the Harrisburg 8, Camden 28, Flower City Conspiracy, Hoover Vacuum Conspiracy and Women Against Daddy Warbucks.

The movie describes how these actions evolved tactically from ours (where four people poured blood on draft files and waited to be arrested, hence the phrase, “hit and stay”) to the perhaps best known action, the Catonsville 9 (where draft files were burned with napalm) to actions like Women Against Daddy Warbucks (where files were cut into confetti).

In some, the activists would not wait to be arrested but disappeared, to surface at a later time.

There were also actions where people “hit” and then ran, avoiding capture altogether and others where people acted and then 300 people claimed responsibility, making it impossible for the FBI to arrest any one.

Participants appear speaking frankly and often humorously about their roles and plots and schemes. Tom Melville describes seminary and the priesthood as perfect training grounds for prison.

Weatherperson Bill Ayers says he finds religion rather a “bummer,” but praises the many clergy involved in the draft actions. Jim Forest muses over the drill sergeant side of Phil’s personality.

Charismatic? Yes, he was! (and he wasn’t the only one). There is a powerful sense in the movie of strong, yet kindly and very creative personalities.

The actions, always creative, are in some instances ruined by informants and the FBI. Filmmakers Joe and Skizz find a gripping narrative arc, even though the movie consists largely of talking heads and interviews. Some of the participants seem to provide more of the glue to hold the story together than others, people such as Jim Forest, George Mische, Dan Berrigan and Dean Pappas.

Music and animation in the film is effective, and shots of nature and Baltimore provide welcome breaks to the intensity. Fine, moving, tear-inducing drama is achieved. Sadly, a number of crucial actors, such as John Grady and of course, Phil Berrigan have passed on.

Still Dying for Oil

To me, Jim Harney and “weather person” Laura Whitehorn give some of the most moving summaries and analysis of what we were trying to accomplish and “were about” and what still needs to be done.

Statements such as theirs make the message of the movie plain and clear one and as relevant now as it will be in the future of war-making America.

Bob Good describes a crucial moment in the trial of the Camden 28 where his mother sternly, heartbreakingly, admonishes the jury: “It is us – we have sent our boys away to this Vietnam enterprise.” She came to realize, Good says, that one of her sons had died for oil, tin and rubber!

The 28 were acquitted in the only instance of jury nullification in the span of the draft action trials, wherein a jury ignores the judge’s admonition to follow his (i.e., the government’s) interpretation of the law. Harrisburg 8 defendants were also acquitted, although most of the trials were (and continue to be!) railroad jobs.

Indeed, it happened after “Hit & Stay” was completed but it could have been part of the story – the July action by three Transform Now Plowshares protesters in which they vandalized a weapons-grade uranium storage facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. (Begun in 1980 by the Berrigan brothers, The Plowshares Movement against nuclear weapons is a direct descendant of the anti-draft actions of the Vietnam era.)

There in Spirit

During, the same week of the “Hit and Stay” showing, in a trial in Knoxville, Tennessee, the three were found guilty of willful destruction of government property and injuring national defense premises with the intent to interfere with the national defense.

Their link to the activists past couldn’t be more direct. They had actually poured the blood of Tom Lewis, preserved since his death (a member of the Baltimore 4 and several Plowshares actions), on the walls of a building containing enough enriched uranium to end life on the planet.

They had hiked a mile to get there, going through four fences, the last three in “Kill Zones” where they could well have been shot. The three, including one 82-year-old nun, Megan Rice, were treated as terrorists!

At Transform’s trial, the atmosphere was grim, their jury and judge seeming as leaden and dead as in the trials portrayed in “Hit & Stay.”

But I take some encouragement from this film, and hope it is a way to reach out to “Middle America,” and not just those of us who feel like a minority of exiles in our own country.

Max Obuszewski raised a good point after the second showing at MICA: Were Phil Berrigan here he would not want us wallowing in nostalgia (leave it to Max to give a clarion “call to arms”). He mentioned the upcoming Bradley Manning demo at Ft. Meade (June 1) and the Sept. 23 sentencing of the Transform Now Plowshares 3.
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David Eberhardt, 72, is a poet (with three books of verse) as well as an activist. He is retired from 33 years of  social work, directing Offender Aid and Restoration, at the Baltimore City Jail. His web site is David Eberhardt Poetry and Prose.