Free We Were Brothers by Barry Moser Page B

humiliating rank as the kid I slapped.
    AS I GREW OLDER AND BIGGER, and as I increased in rank, both militarily and socially, I, too, became part of the hazing tradition, gleefully inflicting these traditional torments on the younger, more feckless, bus-riding day boys. Naturally, it was always done in fun—for the perpetrators anyway, as had always been the case.

    Barry Moser in Baylor uniform, 1957
    As a cadet officer I was a seventeen-year-old fascist, having been well indoctrinated and initiated by five years of other young, dilettante fascists. I barked and hollered and screamed and prodded and poked and slapped my troops upside their heads just like I had been barked at and hollered at and poked and prodded and slapped upside my head when I was their age and of their rank and in their position. I can only wonder how my brother might have acted had he stayed the course and had become a senior cadet officer.
    As the years went by the militaristic animus that Baylor instilled in me faded, just like the racism my family instilled in me. Less so with Tommy, though he did actual military service. I did not.
    He joined the National Guard in 1960 and did his basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He did not join for patriotic or chauvinistic reasons. He joined to avoid being drafted, because he had no deferments. He was not in school nor was he married, so he was in a precarious situation vis-à-vis the Selective Service System. So he took the least risky route available to him and joined the National Guard and avoided being cannon fodder in Vietnam, where he most certainly would have ended up had he been drafted.
    I was fully invested in the military imperative when I left Baylor. Six years of military school coupled up with a family who wanted nothing more than for one of the sons to go to West Point (or, that failing, to become a doctor, lawyer, or minister) and you have a solid martial foundation that I was eager to build on. I wanted to be a fighter pilot more than anything I could think of, and would have joined the U.S. Air Force had I good eyesight. But I had poor eyesight. And if I couldn’t be a fighter pilot, I didn’t want to be anything.
    In June 1966, one of my best friends from Baylor, Parks McCall, a radar systems operator in the backseat of an F-4C Phantom jet, was killed in Vietnam. And with his death all the spit and polish that the Baylor School for Boys and my family had put on the face of things military became tarnished.
    And my life’s direction shifted dramatically.
    I found myself siding with the antiwar movement, though I did so mutely, wary of familial and societal repercussions. And at the same time I found myself sympathizing with folks who were sitting in at Woolworth’s. Again, mutely. My obvious cowardice would not have served me well in military service.
    I MANAGED TO STAY a step ahead of the draft, though not by virtue of any kind of plan. I had been a preacher in college as well as a student, so I was deferred. After college I was no longer a preacher but I was married and had started teaching and both of those conditions were deferments. Then the babies came along. Eventually I was too old for the draft.
    I was a student at the University of Chattanooga when I first began examining my family’s teachings about race. I was the second person in my family to go to college (Albert Moser being the first), and that opened up worlds hitherto unknown to and unseen by me. It was while I was at university that I received my license to preach in the Methodist Church. I embraced Christianity with a fundamentalist’s zeal, and as I read and reread and reread the Gospels, paying particular attention to the teachings of Jesus, especially the Beatitudes, I began to seriously question the values of my family, the values of the society in which I lived, and the values of my church community. And as I reexamined those values, I was being exposed to new values and ideas, primarily under the guidance of