published in Lberation, May-June 1967

by Barbara Deming

In other years when other individuals were singled out to receive this award (the annual peace award of the war resisters league), it never seemed strange to me. But this year when I learned that I was being singled out, it suddenly did seem very strange to me. I asked myself why. It's not that I have any less ego than the next person. But knowing myself a little, I am very conscious that the actions that I have taken for which, I assume, I am given this award, were all taken not only with other people, but because of them. It seems strange to be standing here without them.

I think, for example, of the trip I took to Saigon last April - along with A.J. Muste and Brad Lyttle and Bill Davidon and Karl Meyer and Sherry Thurber. I remember very clearly the day on which the Call to volunteer for this project arrived in the mail. I had heard about the project for some months, and it had always seemed to me a particularly right and necessary project - to protest the war on the very spot where it was being waged. But it had never occurred to me for a moment to volunteer to be on of those to go. I remember the day the Call arrived. I read it and thought: "Wonderful! It's really going to happen, then! (because there were a lot of people who had volunteered already). But I still don't even pose the question to myself: Would I volunteer? The answer was so plain to me: I was much to scared to. But I wanted to be present at the meetings at which the project was discussed. I turned up at the first meeting and there was Mary Christiansen, who was one of the first to volunteer: and I went up to her and told her that I thought it was wonderful, that she had. And I asked her, "You're not frightened?" She said, "I hadn't really thought about that yet." I thought: This is really the correct order of priorities to give things - to think first about an action that is right to take, and to think later about coping with one's fears. And the moment she said what she did, by a familiar but mysterious process, everything was a little different for me, and for the first moment it occurred to me that I might be able to cope with my own fears.

Then we sat down to the meeting. I particularly remember A.J. at that meeting - with that extraordinary concentration he had on a particular situation and a particular action proposed to speak to the situation. Sitting next to him, I felt my own concentration on such an action sharpen, and my fears did begin to fall into second place. By the end of the meeting I said tentatively, not to put me down as a volunteer but to put me down as a possible volunteer.

I could tell very much the same kind of story about any of the other actions I have taken. I make a point of this not to be humble but because I think it touches us all. I know there are those among us who are more capable than others of acting on their own; but surely none of us acts quite alone - of and by himself. Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another. As I.F. Stone quotes at the Memorial for A.J., "We are all part of one another."

So I would like to talk a little more about some of the fears I experienced on that trip to Saigon. Because my fears didn't end, of course, when I found myself able to volunteer. And in each case these fears taught me again to recognize our interdependence.

Perhaps the most oppressive fears I felt were in the several days before we left this country. I remember being so hypnotized by the fear of being killed over there that, sitting talking with friends and family, I would realize again and again with a shock that I was hearing the sound of their voices but not hearing the words they were speaking. Then the evening we were to set off arrived and I met the rest of the group at the airline terminal - and the moment I walked up to them I suddenly didn't feel any more fear; I felt a very peculiar kind of joy. And we all seemed to be feeling it. We were all smiling at each other almost foolishly. Of course we could all be happy that we were finally acting, not brooding about it. And of course we all believed in what we were doing - which is a happy feeling. But there was something about seeing out together - at least for me - that made it very much easier to feel the joy and not the fear of acting. One smiled at the next person with a kind of tentative happiness in acting, and when that person smiled back, the happiness was no longer tentative. This giving and taking of spirit - one from another and to another - involves a wonderful kind of mathematics. There are situations in which, as e.e. cummings noted, 2 and 2 "is 5" - at least. Given this exchange, we are all of us more than ourselves.

Now I would like to talk about one other experience of fear. It is the experience, I think, through which I learned the most on that trip - with the exception of conversations with some of the Vietnamese we were fortunate enough to meet.

When we first arrived in Saigon I was uneasy in a way that was unfamiliar to me on such projects. Every project in which I had taken part before had been completely open - that is, our purposes had been frankly announced. In this project there was of necessity an element of secrecy: unless we postponed an announcement of our presence and our purpose until the end of our week there, we would have little chance of taking the action we wanted to take, and little chance of making first the many contacts with Vietnamese which might allow us to speak for them as well as for ourselves. But this meant that we would have to be guarded in encounters with strangers; and it was this that made me uncertain of myself. Because I had learned to rely above all in situations of danger on creating an atmosphere of friendliness about us. Once could hardly count on this to prevent violence as if by magic, but it was the best deterrence we had, and sometimes a remarkable one. It is difficult to create an atmosphere of friendliness when one has to be secretive. So having learned to trust in myself by learning to open myself to the most direct human contact with others that was possible, I found it difficult now to summon up the right spirit on which to rely.

Some of the others on the project clearly had a similar problem. And everyone met the problem in a different way. There were those who still put the greatest emphasis on being friendly to everybody, and who were win the process somewhat indiscreet - for example, about revealing to strangers of attitude toward the war. There were others who put the emphasis on discretion and were in the process stiff with curious strangers - even to the point of making them angry. And what began to happen was that one team member would become alarmed at the first kind of action and another would become alarmed at the second. It was too easy for all of us in that situation to imagine encounters that would suddenly endanger us all. In short, we began in those first days to scare each other. What followed, of course, was that some began to wish that this person or that person had never come on the project. I could see this happening in other people and I could feel it in myself. As one pictured in imagination some encounter in which he or she would do just the thing that would be fatal, and one began to tremble, the simplest resolution was always to imagine the person who - supposedly - would do the wrong thing, just magically not there.

I remember at a certain point recognizing with a shock that nothing put us in such danger as precisely this relation to each other which I have been describing. If any of these imagined situations were to occur, to be concentrated on the futile wish that one or the other of my companions were not there, would hardly enable me to cope with it imaginatively. And if any of my companions sensed my fear of them, it would hardly help them. Instead of finding new spirit now, when we looked at each other, we would lose it, we would paralyze each other. I had learned on earlier projects to beware, when confronted by an antagonist, of letting myself panic. And I think one can define the state of panic precisely as that in which one tries to wish that other not there - instead of trying, persisting in trying to establish some kind of human contact with him, which could possibly, in the case of an antagonist, disarm him - and in the case of a companion, it occurred to me slowly now, help him to recover himself if he has made an error. It slowly occurred to me that while we were here, all of us were sure to make mistakes of one kind or another (and this would certainly include me) and the way to ensure that these mistakes would be fatal was to freeze toward one another.

Why have I talked at such length about this particular experience? I might add, before I answer my own question, that by the time we did announce our presence in Saigon and attempt to stage our protest, we were all again at relative ease with one another and again able, in the various moments of strain which followed, to borrow the extra courage from one another that we sometimes needed. But why have I talked so much about this particular experience of fear? It is because I feel very strongly that in the days ahead of us, unless a very great many of us move from words to acts - from words of dissent to acts of disobedience - we are going to have no effect at all upon our government's policy, no effect in halting the terrible momentum of this war. If we do become more bold, and therefore more effective, I think it is fair to predict that our government will, in turn, move more boldly to discourage us. And then if we do not all stand together, helping always whomever is singled out for punishment our effectiveness will end. To stand together is going to be hard. Our movement is composed of all kinds of groups and all kinds of individuals. It is certain that many of us will make all kinds of mistakes. It will become very tempting to wish that this group or that group, this individual or that individual, were simply not among us. My particular plea is that we not surrender to this temptation. We must certainly be frank with each other when we disagree, but my plea is that we not begin to be afraid of any of us and, in a panic, try to wish any of us out of the picture. We will need every one of us. We are all part of one another.

It is, finally, on behalf of all those who are some part of me - and they are too many to name - that I accept this award.