Free The Burglary by Betty Medsger Page A

draft laws. An additional 360,000 were investigated but not charged. Opposition to the war among active-duty troops was unprecedented, but it was not widely reported. Americans were aware of veterans who opposed the war, such as Secretary of StateJohn Kerry of Massachusetts, who with others formedVietnam Veterans Against the War. But few Americans were aware that the antiwar movement was active in barracks, on aircraft carriers, and on the battlefields of Vietnam. According to Pentagon records, 503,926 troops deserted between 1966 and 1971. By 1972, there were reports of entire units refusing to go into battle. One group of soldiers, based at Fort Hood in Texas, refused to report for riot-control duty at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. They knew their assignment would be to control antiwar activists. Because they agreed with those activists, they refused the duty and served time in a military prison.
    THE MEDIA BURGLARS HOPED that if they were successful their effort would demonstrate that it was possible not to be powerless in the face of massive power. They hoped their aggressive nonviolent resistance would make it clear that to fight injustice it wasn’t necessary to match the government’s violence with violence. They also hoped their action would help defeat what they believed were the rampant enemies of dissent at that time—fear, apathy, hopelessness, and now the FBI.
    They found the courage needed for this high-risk venture from diverse sources. Their consciences had been set on fire—by theHolocaust in Europe, byracial injustice in America, by the use of atomic bombs againstJapan in 1945, and, for all of them, especially the youngest members of the group, by the Vietnam War. They were determined—as was German theologianDietrich Bonhoeffer, who heroically resisted theNazis during theHolocaust, was—not to be silent, not to be passive. They rejected silence in the face of injustice. They regarded silence as collaboration with injustice.
    They realized people would be shocked if they knew what they were about to do. Though the country was born as an act of resistance, many Americans had long ago become timid citizens, ready to accept whatever government officials told them, especially about war. Until the war in Vietnam, few Americans had raised questions about an American war, let alone engaged in acts of resistance against one. In recent years, though, more and more people had raised questions about the war in Vietnam. Consequently, as the burglars prepared to test the possibility of breaking into the FBI office in Media, resistance was not the totally strange and forbidding concept it had been just fifteen years earlier.
    Resistance had not been embraced by the masses, but it had been seeping into the American conscience during the last decade. Courage had been made visible repeatedly by civil rights activists in the South. They had set examples. After hundreds oflynchings, and after being excluded from equality for nearly a century after the Civil War, more and more African Americans found the courage to say no to the suppression of their rights. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as they stepped forward to claim their right to vote and other basic rights they had been guaranteed but denied, they faced arrest, imprisonment, even death. As they did so, Americans saw a new vision of courage on the evening news.
    The faces of courage were no longer only faces from the past etched in history books. Courage was not just brave soldiers going ashore at Normandy.It was not justHarriet Tubman leading hundreds of slaves in the dark of night, helping them flee from slavery in the South to freedom in the North as she passed through the Underground Railroad station in the town the burglars soon would make famous again—Media, Pennsylvania. Courage was not just Mahatma Gandhi fasting as he led a massive movement of people in India seeking independence from the British.
    Courage, as people