THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 4, 1996 TAG: 9606040512
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 244 lines
Josh Dworak joined the Navy for the same reasons lots of people do. He wanted to break out of his hometown, Lincoln, Neb., and see the world. And he needed money for college.
He was trained as a personnelman, a clerical job. But it wasn't until he was assigned to the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier George Washington that the reality of his new life hit him squarely in the face.
It was during shipboard training about a month after he joined the crew.
``The instructor asked us if we knew what the purpose of the ship was and what our role in it was,'' Dworak recalled last week. ``A lot of us described our jobs: `I'm a personnelman, I do paperwork.'
``And he corrected us by saying, `This ship's purpose is to be able to draw up along the shore of any country in the world, bomb the hell out of it and return. And your job is to make sure the ship can carry out that function.'
``And then it hit me: No matter what little part I played, I was still a gear in that machine.''
The more he thought about it, the more uneasy he became. Eventually he began a laborious process that resulted last month in his discharge from the Navy as a conscientious objector to military service.
Conscientious objectors have been around as long as warriors have. But since the end of the Vietnam War and the advent of the all-volunteer force, their numbers have declined markedly.
Lloyd Lee and Susan Wilson would like to reverse that trend.
The Wilsons are Quakers. Here in the shadow of the world's largest naval complex, they and like-minded members of the historically pacifist church have set out on a David-and-Goliath quest to offer a peaceful alternative to militarism.
In a nondescript bungalow on Tidewater Drive, they operate Norfolk Quaker House, a counseling center for military personnel who develop doubts about what they are doing. They also hope to reach out to young people who are considering the military life but haven't yet made the commitment and show them there are other options.
Josh Dworak is one of their early success stories.
After that moment of illumination aboard the George Washington, Dworak, 24, began re-examining his core beliefs. He devoured reading material put out by Greenpeace, Food Not Bombs and other peace-oriented organizations. He studied the life of the great Indian pacifist Mahatma Gandhi and looked into Eastern philosophies such as that laid out in the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of wisdom.
He also began reading the New Testament in a new light. Reared in a nondenominational evangelical church, he had been regularly exposed to the Bible. ``But I wasn't really looking into the Bible for myself,'' he said. ``I was just taking what I was being told.''
Now he looked at the words of Christ through a different lens. ``I noticed that a lot of what Jesus said was really not as pro-war as I used to think,'' he said.
He began discussing his inner upheaval with the ship's chaplain. But he found few sympathetic ears among his shipmates.
That's when he discovered the Wilsons.
A friend at a Food Not Bombs food giveaway in downtown Norfolk gave him the Quaker House phone number. Once they made contact, the Wilsons kept up a regular correspondence with Dworak as the George Washington participated in war games off the coast and embarked on a six-month deployment to the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
To some degree, the Wilsons' role was one of moral support. ``A carrier can be a lonely place for someone with Josh's convictions,'' Lloyd Lee Wilson said.
But the counseling had a more practical side, too. The Wilsons helped Dworak negotiate the maze of regulations and forms involved in getting a discharge. They even role-played the hearing where he would have to make his case to an investigating officer.
Dworak filed his discharge application in February. After an interview with the ship's medical officer and a review of his application by the legal department, the next step was the hearing. As he waited for it to be scheduled, Dworak became concerned that his superiors were dragging their feet. So he wrote his congressman and senators.
``The next day, they had the hearing set up,'' he said.
Three and a half months after submitting his application, Dworak received an honorable discharge and was flown back to Norfolk.
Now, he said, ``I'm going to go home for a couple months, then come back and help out Quaker House if I can. I want to be able to help other people live what they believe.''
He has only one regret about his break with the Navy.
``I met a really good friend on the ship who thought along the same lines,'' he said. ``In fact, he's starting this whole process this week. It's tough to leave him. I feel really bad for him, because I'm not sure who he's going to be able to talk to.''
At times in his odyssey, it may have seemed to Dworak that no one could understand what he was going through. But Lloyd Lee Wilson knew better. He had traveled a similar road 25 years ago.
Wilson, 48, grew up a churchgoing Methodist in a small town on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
``The community culture was that all good young men served time in the military,'' he recalled. ``That was your patriotic duty.''
So he enrolled in the Reserve Officer Training Corps in college and finished as a distinguished military graduate. After receiving his Air Force commission, he got a deferment from active duty so he could go to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was raging. Wilson, like many other young Americans at the time, became increasingly disenchanted with what was happening. The turning point for him was the revelation that President Nixon had secretly expanded the war by authorizing bombing runs into Cambodia.
``I began to realize that there was a real discrepancy here between what I thought was going on - the military as an honorable profession where everybody tells the truth - and my commander-in-chief lying to me, lying to the nation about what was going on,'' he said.
``That threw me back on my religious roots, and I began to re-examine my religious teachings, childhood Bible passages, in a whole new light and to see the teachings of Jesus not as an ideal never to be attained but as a commandment for how we go about our daily life.''
That's when he found the Quakers. When he accepted their commitment to nonviolence, the change in Wilson's life was profound.
``I dropped out of MIT graduate school, the Air Force and the Methodist Church all at the same time,'' he said.
Discharged as a conscientious objector, he went to work in a hospital.
Today he and his wife, Susan, who came to the Quaker church from a Southern Baptist background, own a company that provides management services to nonprofit organizations.
``For Quakers, their beliefs are the underpinning for their lives,'' Susan Wilson said. ``Your life is not partitioned. There is one constant stream of belief underpinning all you do.''
About a year and a half ago, the couple felt driven to ``express our faith and our beliefs in practice,'' she said. And Quaker House was born.
The operation is governed by a board of directors that is dominated by, but not limited to, Quakers. ``It's not just a Quaker thing, it's really a human condition thing,'' Susan Wilson said.
Supported wholly by donations, the Quaker House counselors make it their business to educate potential conscientious objectors about their legal rights.
``Through a long series of court cases and struggles over generations, the standards that have to be met are now fairly well defined,'' Lloyd Lee Wilson said.
``You don't have to be a Quaker; you don't have to be a Christian; you don't even have to be religious. But your belief has to occupy a place in your life that religion would occupy if you were a religious person.
``You have to be an objector to all wars, not specific wars. And in a volunteer service, you have to have come to this conclusion after you enlisted.''
As part of their ministry, the Wilsons visit sailors imprisoned in the Norfolk brig for unauthorized absences.
``The brig's a federal penitentiary,'' Lloyd Lee Wilson said. ``It's not the hardest time in the world, but it's no fun place to be.''
Eventually, the Wilsons hope to offer ``counter-recruitment'' in local schools, helping young people explore alternatives to military service and correcting what they see as misleading inducements cited by military recruiters.
``The service is selling this as a job,'' Lloyd Lee Wilson said. ``Name another employer that throws you in a federal penitentiary because you want to quit!''
He warns young people considering military service about the ``family trap,'' which he describes this way: ``They enlist, they're lonely, they get married, they have a kid, they have subsidized housing, and they're trapped. Because they cannot make the transition out of the Navy into civilian work at pay levels that will enable them to maintain their standard of living.''
Set against Hampton Roads' massive military presence, the Wilsons' humble effort might seem hopeless to some. But the odds don't seem to bother them.
There was a time, Susan Wilson admitted, when she felt ``overwhelmed by how much there was to learn, how much there was to know. But that wasn't the issue.
``It almost came like a bolt of lightning to me. The issue here is one of individual conversion, changes that are happening in people's lives that are completely outside of the fighting of ideologies and the writing of editorials and the waving of flags.
``And coming from that place, where I'm not trying to argue turf, I'm not trying to argue facts and figures and ideas or ideologies, coming from the place of the core belief on which you live your life, there's an eternal fire burning there that doesn't get blown out.''
Lloyd Lee Wilson put it this way: ``The New Testament doesn't talk a whole lot about success. It talks a lot about faithfulness.''
He told a story to illustrate the point.
``One Christmas on an island off the coast of Georgia, I woke up one morning and thousands of sand dollars had washed up on the beach. I reached down and started throwing them back.
``A friend of mine said, `Lloyd Lee, what are you doing? You're never going to make a difference. There's thousands of sand dollars here.'
``I said, `Well, you pick one up and throw it back. It made a difference to him. You pick the next one up, throw it back. It made a difference to him.'
``That's what we're about. You've got to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. You can't just sit here and say `Gee, how nice it is to live in a peaceful world.' You have to be engaged with individuals and help them try to find a peaceful world too.''
And Susan Wilson added a coda:
``To not live that way when you've been called to live that way is unfaithful. It's cowardice.'' MEMO: To contact Norfolk Quaker House, call 626-3304 or the nationwide
G.I. Rights Hotline, 1-800-FYI-95GI. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MIKE HEFFNER/The Virginian-Pilot
Increasingly uncomfortable with his role in the military, Josh
Dworak, 24, turned to Norfolk Quaker House. The group helped him
apply for a discharge, which he received last month.
Photo
MIKE HEFFNER/The Virginian-Pilot
Susan Wilson, left, and her husband, Lloyd, are counselors at the
Norfolk Quaker House, a center that assists conscientious objectors
to military service. They helped Josh Dworak, right, navigate Navy
bureaucracy as he applied for a discharge.
Graphics
OBJECTORS
To qualify for discharge as a conscientious objector, a military
member must demonstrate a sincerely held objection to participation
in all war. The objection does not have to have a religious basis,
but it must occupy the same place in the objector's life that
religious belief would occupy in a religious person.
THE QUAKERS
Their real name is the Religious Society of Friends. Early
members of the sect were given the derisive name ``Quakers'' because
their fervor often caused them to tremble as they preached or
prayed.
The sect was founded by George Fox, a 17th century Englishman who
as a young man was disillusioned by the failure of professing
Christians to live their beliefs. At age 19 he set out on a
spiritual quest, seeking out and challenging religious leaders, but
failed to find satisfaction. In despair, in 1647 he heard a voice
say, ``There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy
condition.'' From that experience he developed a new understanding
of the human-divine relationship that he believed amounted to a
rediscovery of primitive Christianity. Among its central tenets:
God is directly accessible to everyone without the need of an
intermediary priest or ritual.
The power and love of God erase the division between the secular
and religious so that all of life, when lived in the spirit,
becomes sacramental.
The first American Quakers settled in Boston in 1656. Their
treatment varied widely: They were brutally persecuted in
Massachusetts but allowed to flourish in Rhode Island. In the 1680s
William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a ``holy
experiment,'' basing its governance on Quaker principles. Today
there are Quaker ``meetings'' in some 56 countries.
Out of the basic Quaker principles have grown specific
applications which Friends call ``testimonies.'' Among them:
Equality of sex, race and class.
Opposition to all war and to capital punishment.
Simple living, stewardship of the environment and commitment to
social justice.
Reaching across cultural barriers to build a broader human
community.
KEYWORDS: CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS U.S. MILITARY by CNB