Troubled Hero: A Medal of Honor, Vietnam, and the War at Home

5. Maybe I Can Help Somebody

5 MaybeICanHelpSomebody In late summer of 1969, David Steiner, Joe Keoughan, and other friends of Ken Kays returned to their respective colleges. Meanwhile, Kays sat at home as national and world events continued to unfold and fashion his destiny. At first the news about the war and the draft seemed hopeful. Draft boards everywhere had begun to announce they would be cutting back on the numbers called in October. In late September, the Wayne County Press noted with some optimism, “The October draft call, according to Mrs. Mary J. Bullock has been cut from 11 to 4 for Wayne County, and that’s good news. If we read the Nixon plan right, only about 11 will go from the county over the three month period of October, November, and December. Which will be good news for some lucky draft registrants who might have made up the call.”1 In September, President Nixon himself declared, “The time has come to end this war.” In his speech the president announced that 35,000 more men would come home by mid-December and that the numbers “could go higher.”2 Unfortunately, Kays and others in his situation were unaware of the president’s political dilemma. Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had been politically destroyed by the war. After winning by a landslide in 1964, Johnson announced in March of 1968, after his acceleration of the war in Vietnam had turned the electorate against him, that he would not seek re-election. Now it was Nixon’s turn in the hot seat. Indeed, it would only take a short while for the news media to switch from speaking of Johnson’s war to criticizing Nixon’s war. Politically, Nixon could not simply pull out the troops. As he told one columnist at this time, “I’m not going to be the first president to preside over an American defeat.” Nixon also declared, “The peace we will be able to achieve will be due to the fact that Americans, when it really counted, did not buckle, did not run away, but stood fast so that the enemy knew they had no choice but to negotiate.”3 In time, this position meant that more than twenty thousand more Americans would die as the United States struggled Maybe I Can Help Somebody | 49 to disengage in Vietnam. Further, the division Kays would later serve with, the 101st Airborne, would receive the difficult task of maintaining heavy contact with the enemy as other American forces slowly stood down. Many astute leaders saw the darker possibilities of Nixon’s stand of “peace with honor.” Eugene McCarthy, for example, noted, “It’s almost like we were back in 1966.”4 In mid-October, less than a month after the exhilaration of Woodstock, Ken Kays received the news he had been dreading since flunking out at SIU. With fumbling fingers, he opened the letter addressed to him and quickly scanned the first line in disbelief: The President of the United States, to Kenneth M. Kays. Greetings: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States. The words struck like a sledgehammer to the stomach. Kays wasted little time seeking conscientious objector status through the local draft board. While the process seemed straightforward enough, determining CO status was a subjective process left in the hands of local draft boards and was thus subject to local norms and politics. Kays would seem to have had an advantage because of his parents’ standing in the community, but by 1969 John and Ethel Kays’ status in Fairfield probably carried less weight than their son’s perceived antiauthoritarian behavior. Nevertheless, Kays hopefully filled out Selective Service Form 150, which required applicants to state whether they were requesting I-A-O status, which meant that they were willing to serve in the military in a noncombatant role, or I-O status, which meant that they were not willing to serve in the military in any capacity. Kays chose the latter status. The form also required applicants to write essays concerning “their reasons for requesting I-A-O or I-O status; the religious nature of their beliefs; the development of their beliefs from early childhood; and any public or private expressions of their pacifism.” In reviewing the application, the draft board was to focus on the applicant’s sincerity, “though in fact there was wide variation across the country in the draft boards’ handling of CO applications.”5 If the local draft...