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My undergraduate education was interrupted by Selective Service (1942). I was a member of the Baptist Church at that time, but my mother’s family were Quakers. I had an uncle who was a non-combatant in World War I. His three brothers all stayed out of the army.

As far as I knew at the time I was the only conscientious objector in Bloomington. I also refused to take compulsory ROTC training at Indiana University. I think I was the first male student to take that stand and that created quite a bit of stir at the university.

It took some doing [to receive conscientious objector status]; it was a fairly complicated and lengthy process. I had to submit statements and testimonials. I did not have to have a personal hearing in front of the draft board as many guys did. I finally left for camp in 1943 [going to] Lyndhurst, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge National Park.

I volunteered to go west for the fire season [to control burns], so that’s how I wound up at Waldport. I felt that was somewhat more urgent than constructing the parkway [at the Lyndhurst camp]. We were drafted, to quote it, “To do work of national significance in alternative Civilian Service.” And for some of us that was not a hollow phrase.

I arrived there in April of 1944 and I was in the base camp of Waldport for no more than nine or ten weeks. Then I went to a side camp at Mount Hebo, which was 30 or 40 miles from Waldport in the coastal range. We cleared snags and also planted fresh trees. Shortly after I started working, there was a need for somebody to be on a fire tower, and I got that job.

Churches supplied the food cooked by camp residents.

Then the opportunity opened up to do something that was really relevant to the world crisis in the semi-starvation study [in Minneapolis]. It was as close as I could get to doing something to help relieve the suffering in the war without contributing to it. An individual weight loss curve was set up for each of us so that by the end of six months of semi-starvation we would arrive at a body weight approximately between 60 to 65 percent of our normal weight. The diet we got was a replication of the diet of Western Europeans during the famine. So it was a lot of root food and legumes and a lot of potatoes. The purpose of our study was to learn the most effective and efficient way to rehabilitate starved populations.

The European war ended May 7, 1945, and we had been starving since the 15th of January. We were finally released in May or June of 1946. Selective Service tended to keep us to make sure that we were not released ahead of the guys in uniform. I left the base camp a little early because there was an opportunity to volunteer for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) as a sea-going cowboy. The Church of the Brethren and the Mennonites had started a project of sending shiploads of pregnant heifers to first Poland, then other areas, as the army of occupation took over. It was such a successful program that the United Nations picked it up [using] old Liberty ships.

As it turned out, I was only able to make one trip. I went to Greece with a load of mares that had been rounded up in the “wilds” of Texas.

Being a conscientious objector, I must say, was my equivalent to going off to college. Some of the older men were kind of bitter about being isolated. I could never fully share those feelings because for me it was more of a liberating experience. [Mundy went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s in social work at Indiana University.]