Vietnam voices: Arthur Dobrin

Arthur Dobrin. 65, of Westbury, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was the spiritual leader of the anti-war Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island from 1968 to 2001. He now teaches ethics at Hofstra University.

Initially, I had been a tepid supporter of the war. . . . But as I got into the reasons for us getting into the war, it became less and less supportable. So by the summer of '69 I was fully committed against the war.

For myself, I already had a discharge from the Army because I had joined the Reserve while I was in high school. So my anti-war activity wasn't out of self-interest in trying to stay out of the Army. As a community leader, the war had become a very important cause. I literally felt as if the country was on the cusp of either really capturing some of the idealism of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the flower children, or of falling into a chaos of fascism, right-wing populism. It was a new world, and there was no way to know which way it was going to turn, really good or really ugly. I had two young children and I wanted them to grow up in a better world, a world that was going to contain all the great things young people were talking about. But here we were in the middle of a war, and cities were burning down. We felt like we were living in a revolution. It is hard to describe. It was exhilarating and frightening.

I think the soldiers who were mistreated when they came back were right that there were anti-war demonstrators who didn't handle it correctly. Having said that, the soldiers who burned down villages and killed women and children . . . you couldn't be neutral about that. You had to be for it or against it. And those who fought and thought they were doing the right thing by doing that, you had to vigorously disagree with them. You couldn't politely disagree. The war was so all-consuming, you had to take a stand.