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When I entered high school, there was a book called All Quiet on the Western Front. It was a history of World War I—full of graphic pictures of death, destruction, and how nations wasted their resources fighting one another. We had several neighbors that were in World War I. Those men sure did suffer.

By the time I entered college in the fall of 1941 [University of Oklahoma], they took out Bible study as an accredited course. The freshmen in the university had to take ROTC for two years. They put in the draft, and I had read that you could register as a conscientious objector. When it came my turn to register, that is the way I went. Eventually, I was drafted and sent to a camp in Magnolia, Arkansas.

[The Magnolia camp was soon destroyed by a tornado and the COs were transferred to other CPS camps.]

Waldport camp was run like the Magnolia camp. The Brethren Church furnished the food, and the government furnished the housing and the work. The boys were not paid anything for their work. They furnished their own clothes, their own shoes, and their own gloves.

We were out one day [on work duty], and we had a boy fall off the side of the mountain. The doctor down in Florence looked at him and said to keep him in bed a few days and see if his injury straightens out.

The men worked six days a week felling snags and planting trees at the Waldport camp. (Photos courtesy of camp resident Myron Miller.)

Well, the boy got better, and he would go out and work. He would black out, because of his spinal cord injury. They wouldn’t send him back to the main camp. They wouldn’t let us keep him in the camp. They said he had to show up for work. That is when I decided to write Selective Service and walk out of camp.

I went back to Norman. The third day I was there, Mr. Bernier of the Oklahoma University police department wanted me to come in and take care of the switchboard. I told him that I was probably a fugitive, and he might not want me on the job. He says, “I know you; come in and go to work.”

I worked nights on the switchboard. During the day, I would plow on the farm and help dad get in a fall wheat crop. About 40 days went by, and one evening the U.S. Marshall knocked on the door. He took me to Oklahoma City and put me in the county jail. Evidently, they considered me a mean character. I had a $1 million bail set for me.

I stayed in that county jail about two and a half months [before] the U.S. Marshall took me back to Portland. I was sentenced to a year at McNeil Island [Washington state]. They sent me on out to the farm camp, where there were 500 Japanese boys and probably 20 or 25 COs who had refused to go to camp.

All the honest prisoners had respect for the Japanese boys and the COs. The Japanese weren’t COs, but they would not go in the Army because their folks had been put in concentration camps. Some of them had brothers that did go in the Army. They thought it might help their parents get out.

My experience as a CO was very good. I grew and learned an understanding of my fellow man. I do not think the wars that the U.S. enters into are good. I think there should be a better way, but I do not run things.