Induction Day

by Barry Fields

Dave lucked out by finding a parking spot on 17th Street, just a few blocks from Oakland City Hall, a half hour early for lunch with his uncle. He turned off the ignition in the middle of Simon and Garfunkel’s current hit, “Mrs. Robinson”, on the radio so often he was tired of it. Unfolding the city map against the steering wheel, he verified the directions. It looked like five minutes on foot. The late June weather, warm and sunny, made for pleasant walking on a street lined with buildings of three to six stories, storefronts on the ground floor and, on upper levels, open windows, flower pots on window sills, and laundry lines on iron grid fire escape landings. A section of concrete wall with STOP THE DRAFT crudely sprayed in bright red paint irritated him. He wished he had his own cans of paint to replace it with STOP HO CHI MIN.

Voices shouting in rhythmic unison reached him before he saw the barricades up ahead. He overtook a tall Black man with an afro lighting a cigarette. He looked to be around his age. There were no African Americans in his neighborhood in Edison, New Jersey and he had no Black friends at Rutgers, where he had just finished his freshman year. 

The afro put him off, and he almost walked by without addressing him. Well, he thought, he isn’t going to bite. “Excuse me. What’s going on up there?”

“Are you for real?” 

“I’m not from around here. I just want to get to City Hall.”

He took a drag on his cigarette. “We’re protesting the draft at the induction center. Been doing it for months, but there’s more people today than ever. It’s going to be fucking out of sight. There’s busloads of draftees coming. We’re going to save them from the clutches of the military machine, man.” He began walking and Dave stepped alongside him. 

“Well, there’s a war,” Dave said. “We need people to fight it.”

“Fuck the war, man. There’s thousands of us this time, and we’re going to stop the recruits from going inside no matter what it takes. Get the U.S. out of Vietnam and there won’t be anything to fight.”

“We’ve got to stop the commies. War is the only way we can do it.” 

“I don’t know who you think ‘we’ is. It’s not a Black man’s war. We got enough to fight right here at home.” He inhaled deeply and flicked the ash. “The north can have the whole fucking country as far I’m concerned. If the Tet Offensive taught a lesson, it’s that America can’t win the war anyway.” 

There was only one right way to view Vietnam, and this radical troublemaker was parroting ideas of people who didn’t have it. Dave could tell him about his pride in his father, who had been wounded in World War II and received a Purple Heart and Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery in battle in France. That he had worked his way up to lieutenant in his hometown police department with only a high school education. That Dave awaited the chance to earn his respect by showing courage in combat himself. But he kept it all to himself. “We’re there for a reason. Don’t forget the Gulf of Tonkin. General Westmoreland says he can win with more troops.”

The fellow shook his head as though he pitied Dave. “Not a lot of people believe him anymore. Not even Johnson. Listen, whatever side you’re on, there’s fucking pigs everywhere. They got orders to make sure nothing stops those draftees from getting into the building. You watch, they’ll go out of their way to arrest Black people. Fucking pigs.”

Dave tensed up every time the guy cursed police officers and involuntarily clenched his fists at his sympathy for the enemy. The guy wore faded jeans, beat-up once-white basketball shoes, and a tee shirt stenciled with a raised fist and “BLACK POWER.”  He probably had a chip on his shoulder because he lived in a run-down slum and his father worked somewhere for minimum wage. Blamed the world for his problems and his poverty-stricken family.

“Why you looking at me like that?”

Dave lowered his eyes. He was well aware police had a history of being overly aggressive, first in the civil rights movement in the South, then in peace rallies as public sentiment against the war grew. He thought again of his father, who had taught him respect for the law and the officers who enforced it, for people regardless of color. 

“Most cops are fair. They treat everyone the same.” 

“That’s a fucking fairy tale. The Oakland police are a vicious bunch of racist honkies. You know how soldiers used to treat Indians? The pigs are like that towards anyone with dark skin.”

Dave suspected him of exaggerating. The Oakland Police had a reputation of heavy-handed treatment of anti-war marchers, but according to reports he’d read, the protesters deserved blame too, almost asking for reprisals by throwing rocks and bottles at the police. 

People stood or walked in the middle of the road, almost all of them in their early twenties or younger. On campus, he avoided students like them: guys with long hair covering their ears, a few down to their shoulders, dressed in bell-bottom jeans and tee shirts with peace symbols. A lot of the women wore long skirts and brightly colored button-down blouses, although some wore grungy jeans and tee shirts like the men. Not the kind of women that interested him. He hesitated at the wooden barricades, then followed the Black fellow into the street. To the right, in the direction of the induction center and his destination at the city hall plaza, the dense crowd chanted. Hell no, we won’t go, over and over as they slowly walked. Some held signs and makeshift banners: Bring the Troops Home Now. Peace and Freedom. Stop the Draft. 

Dave could bypass the revolting scene and reach City Hall by crossing to the next street before heading south, but the dense mob, backed by a wall of police, induced him to follow his acquaintance. The crush of this mass of people pushed them along towards the induction center.

“Watch out for the pigs,” his escort warned. “Even though you’re white, they’ll attack you just because you’re here and arrest you, then claim it was self-defense. You dig what I’m saying?”

Maybe that happened here, but Dave knew that the principles his father espoused, ethics shared by his fellow officers, prevented his ever assaulting people for no reason and lying about it. If this Black stranger didn’t like it in America, he could go freeze his ass off in Canada like other draft dodgers and commie sympathizers. If Vietnam fell to Ho Chi Min’s forces, the rest of Southeast Asia would go communist. He wished he could wave his own sign: Support Our Troops. 

After several minutes of being jostled along in the press of bodies, he decided to ditch the Black guy, who joined in the chanting: Hell no, we won’t go. Hell no, we won’t go. But getting away from him turned out to be impossible, surrounded as he was at the induction center. Joan Baez, the folk singer, stood right in front of the building’s door leading a group in a repetitive song. Near her, a young man standing on a box, his head a foot above the crowd, held aloft his draft card and lit it on fire to cheers. He stepped down and another man took his place, then another, each card accompanied by cries of support that added to the cacophony of chants and song.

How ironic to be an ROTC cadet, itching to serve in Vietnam after graduation, involuntarily trapped in the midst of a huge protest against the draft. Reporters and the FBI filmed and took pictures at demonstrations like this, and he prayed no one aimed a camera at him. 

The whole scene abruptly changed when someone shouted, “The buses are coming!” The warning was taken up by someone else, and then a chorus of voices joined in. Hundreds of people sat down in the street to block them, including the Black fellow. A line of Greyhound buses flanked by police motorcycles, sirens wailing, crept along from the north, preceded by a large phalanx of police officers on foot two deep, shields up and nightsticks in hand. Dave retreated back onto the sidewalk opposite the induction center, those behind him pressing against the wall of buildings. Some on the fringes fled. Blue uniforms cleared the street by shoving standing protestors to the side until they came to those sitting in the road, when they began swinging their batons and dragging them away to waiting paddy wagons. Dave shouted out, “Stop! Stop!” but barely heard his own voice in the dense confusion of blaring sirens, police bulldozing into the seated crowd, and howls of pain as batons rained down. 

Dave frantically searched for an escape from the cops in battle gear, some appearing to enjoy clearing the street with sadistic ferocity, but the dense throng held him captive. His heart leapt and, fearing for his safety when several cops headed in his direction, he tried to wedge himself closer to the building behind him. But the nearest police officer made directly for the Black fellow who sat cross-legged with his hands planted on the street for support. As several officers hauled a few protesters away, the cop stepped with determination over several white kids and swung his stick at the Black guy, striking his upper arm. He screamed, then fell over when punched in the face, and lay silently on the pavement as the cop kicked him several times in the side with tactical boots, stopping only when he saw a Black woman several yards away. The cop made for her and swung again, then looked back towards the guy Dave had walked with.

It was one thing to know about harsh treatment of demonstrators in the abstract, and another to witness police raging like out-of-control maniacs. Dave, appalled but unaware of making a decision, rushed into the street, now partially cleared of protesters, and headed towards the Black fellow even as the cop who had struck him was making his way towards him as well. Dave reached him first. “Stand up,” Dave shouted, and helped the young man to his feet. Together they staggered back to the sidewalk, the man doubled over with his good arm around Dave’s neck and back. 

“Let us through,” Dave cried out when he got to the sidewalk, “Let us through.” He roughly pushed and threaded his way past the throng of standing people, who had stopped chanting, and into the shelter of an alcove where there was more room. He eased the hurt fellow down to the ground, his back propped up by a door. A plate glass window to the left displayed men’s and women’s shiny leather dress shoes. 

Dave crouched down. “Are you okay?”

The fellow shook his head. “I can’t move my arm. The pain. Oh, fuck. I think my arm’s broken. My side …” 

Dave could no longer see what was happening from their recess. A few minutes passed. People started coughing and gagging, and in another few seconds the pepper spray reached them. His eyes burned and vision blurred, and when he inhaled his nose felt like he was breathing fire. 

“We’re getting out of here,” Dave yelled. He stretched out his hand to the man on the ground and helped him to his feet. They merged into the melee, almost getting knocked down by the panicked onslaught, probably half-blind like Dave. The sharp, stinging pain in his eyes made it hard to keep them open. Suffocating, coughing, his skin and nose burning, he made slow forward progress. The injured man at his side, also with a hacking cough, warned him. “Don’t rub your eyes. It makes it worse. Keep blinking.”

Heading south, they rested before they’d gone a block. Behind them, streets emptied of protesters, the first buses reached the induction center. The air around the building had cleared, and recruits filed into the building. Young, some with long hair, they didn’t look any different from the protesters. 

At 14th Street, heavy with road traffic and a steady flow of escaping protesters, Dave turned at the corner, hoping to find a drug store to buy eye drops.

“My name’s Dave, by the way.”

“Jayden Williams. You know, you’re way straight but you’re alright. Thanks.”

“No sweat. That cop was coming for you.”

“That’s what it’s like when you’re Black. Been happening all my life. Going to keep on happening until Black people wake up and do something about it.”

Racism. He’d just witnessed an example of the worst kind. Even if Jayden wasn’t exaggerating, the doing-something-about-it part sounded menacing. He fiercely believed in America, a place where anyone could make it, even if it might be a little tougher if you had dark skin. Jayden, his breathing shallow, battered and bruised with his right hand cupped around his swollen left arm, walked with difficulty, still bent over. If he had the chance, he’d argue the point later.

By the time they made it to Dave’s rental car, the burning was easing up even without artificial tears and Dave had missed his lunch date. He opened the passenger door and shut it as soon as Jayden got in, his swollen left eye already black and blue.

“Why are you helping me?”

“I’ve got time and you need to see a doctor. Where’s the nearest hospital?” Which didn’t answer the question. Maybe assisting Jayden now was atonement for his distrust and suspicion at first seeing him. Or maybe it was just a normal reaction to seeing an injured person who required help.

“Take me to Berkeley Student Health Services. Make your first left and get onto San Pablo.”

“You’re a student?” 

“Why the shock? Can’t an African American be a student?”

“Yeah, sure. Of course. It’s just that, well …” Tongue tied, Dave followed directions onto San Pablo, then a brief stretch of highway. Finally, he continued, “The way you were talking, I just didn’t think …” Blushing and ashamed of his own bigoted presumptions, he didn’t finish. 

Jayden instructed him to turn north on Shattuck Avenue. Dave was staying at his uncle’s home in the prestigious North Berkeley hills and had taken the same street that morning in the other direction. 

After dropping Jayden off in front of the health center, Dave found a metered parking place and walked back. In the waiting room, he couldn’t stop the mental vision of police clubbing their way through the crowds. The replays tortured him as they ran over and over in an insistent loop. He picked up a two-week-old Life Magazine to distract himself. On the cover, Senator Robert Kennedy ran with his dog under a cloudy sky in the surf on a beach. 

Anguish overwhelmed him again as he read the story covering Kennedy’s life and assassination earlier that month. He stopped at one troubling line and read it several times. The author referred to the compulsion to violence and wrote that Americans had to ask themselves if they, and society as a whole, were accomplices in the murder. 

Could that be the case? No. Absolutely not. His mother country was not so brutal that it gave birth to lawless bloodshed. As a future officer in the United States Army, a fighter for a just cause, he would join the ranks of a dedicated corps that defended freedom against foreign barbarity. Draft dodgers and peaceniks might anger his father and him, but neither of them nor any policemen he knew would ever beat an unarmed civilian like Jayden. 

He waited over an hour before Jayden emerged through the clinic door clutching a prescription bottle of Dilaudid, his arm immobilized against his body in a sling and his discolored eye swollen almost shut. Jayden expressed surprise to see him there and reported that x-rays revealed a broken arm and three broken ribs. He accepted the lift Dave offered and asked to be taken to an address in north Oakland.

At the start of the short drive, Jayden said, “You saw what happened out there. What does that do to my-country-right-or-wrong?”

“It doesn’t do anything. The Oakland police don’t represent the whole county. Other departments aren’t like them.”

“Get with it, man. There was police violence in Chicago after Dr. King was assassinated a couple of months ago. Years of police brutality in L.A. led to the Watts riots in sixty-five. There’s racism in the Detroit department as bad as anything in the Deep South. Last year pigs in New Jersey beat the shit out of a Black cab driver because they felt like it. It led to riots as destructive as Watts because people had enough.”

“I live in New Jersey about twenty miles from where it happened. My father’s a cop in Edison. I’m telling you, he’d never do anything like what you’re talking about. He doesn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body.” 

“Are you so sure?”

They stopped in front of a boxy two-story residential house on Grove Street, a number of Black men in front talking in small groups. The sign in one of the windows gave Dave an electrified jolt:

BLACK PANTHER PARTY

WE SERVE THE PEOPLE

The Black Panthers. His instructor in military science had warned about the radical, violent, un-American group. As though in confirmation of this warning, two men came out through the front door wearing black leather jackets, black berets, and guns at their hips. He had never liked Jayden’s politics from the moment he opened his mouth, and this clinched it. Time to drop him off and book it as fast as he could.

Jayden opened the car door and got onto his feet. “Come on in.”

“No, thanks. I should get back to my uncle’s. I missed our lunch date and he’s probably worried about me.”

“You helped me. They’ll want to meet you. Come inside. It won’t take long.”

Dave gripped the steering wheel too tightly, easing up a little when the armed men got into a car and drove off.

“We don’t give a shit about a person's color, if that’s what you’re worried about. What we’re against is oppression. By anyone. Black or white or purple.” Dave reluctantly shut off the engine and followed him. He got a few looks, curious rather than hostile, from people on the sidewalk. In the reception room a secretary was working on an IBM typewriter, two rotary phones on the desk.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.

“An Oakland cop stopped to wish me well.” Jayden led them into another room, where a woman sat at a desk in intense discussion with a couple of members. Dave fixated on two large side-by-side wooden cabinets with glass doors which stood against the opposite wall. Each one held a dozen or so rifles in vertical position, the barrels resting in notches cut into a horizontal bar. 

Conversation came to a halt when they saw Jayden. For the first time in his life, Dave’s white skin relegated him to an uncomfortable minority. He regretted he’d let Jayden talk him into entering a bastion of Black radicalism, especially one with an arsenal of weapons.

“I was at the induction center demonstration,” Jayden began.

One of the men told him to hold on. He stuck his head through the door into the next room and called out, “Eldridge, come here and listen to this.”

“He’s the one in charge,” Jayden whispered to Dave.

A man in his thirties came in, saw Jayden, and said, “Fuckin’ A.” Wearing black dress trousers and a short sleeve button-down shirt, he had a full but neatly trimmed moustache and goatee. His narrow eyes seemed to gaze intensely into things. When Jayden told his story, he looked only at Eldridge.

Jayden took them through the demonstration, the sitting in the street when the buses approached, the vicious assault, Dave saving him from arrest.

Everyone turned their attention to Dave, and Eldridge thanked him for helping. “Relax, young man,” he added. “You look like you’re in a pit of vipers about to get bit.”

“It’s all the guns.” A partial truth.

“What you saw happen to Jayden happens to some degree every day. Police departments are the vanguard of fascism. They’re tools of the ruling class of the country. You don’t have to look any further than Governor Ronald Mickey Mouse Reagan to see that.” The others in the room nodded their agreement and one of them said, “Right on, brother.” Eldridge continued, “A police officer will beat you with a club when ordered to whether he wants to or not, and he’ll say he’s only doing his job. That’s why the Black Panthers formed. To patrol the streets to monitor the Oakland police. To have a presence to stop their violence against our people.” 

Dave couldn’t disagree. Everyone had a right to a gun, and he’d seen Jayden and a girl pounced upon because they were Black. But still, an arsenal in the hands of vigilantes … He moved in front of the gun cases, as if close proximity would render them less threatening. “It sounds like a way to more violence,” he said.

“That happened already,” Jayden said, “but not the way you think. The fascist pigs don’t like us defending ourselves. They purposely created a violent confrontation, and they’re trying to put Eldridge in prison for it.”

Eldridge put his hand on Jayden’s good shoulder. “Why don’t you take it easy? Have a cup of coffee. I’ll show this young man around so he can see what we’re about.”

Eldridge led Dave to another room, where he related his history of juvenile crime and adult rape conviction, then his conversion when he read Malcom X. Dave had difficulty reconciling his appalling background and abysmal politics with his compassion, affable manner, and cogent speech. Eldridge took him through a series of rooms and explained the Black Panther Party’s local programs: free breakfasts for children, voter registration, transportation for the poor, screening for sickle cell anemia, and plans to develop a community school and free medical clinics. Dave was impressed, and told him so., but questioned why he embraced a foreign ideology like communism.

“Because every man, woman, and child has a basic right to the highest standard of living possible. We’re centered in Oakland, but we’re looking beyond Oakland to the rest of the United States and the world. The world is a neighborhood. It’s a community.”

That begged the question, but Dave only said, “A community you care about, I gather.” Russia and China showed that all communism brought was dictatorships with low standards of living and no equality. Still, he admired Eldridge’s down to earth eloquence. 

“God views all of us, the whole planet, as indivisible. When everybody sees that and acts like we’re one community, we’ll have peace. Not before.”

“I want peace,” he asserted. “We all do.”

“If you want peace, you have to be able to say you love Ho Chi Min and what he’s doing. Otherwise, you’re aligning yourself with a government that wants to control the world.” 

The declaration diminished Eldridge in his eyes. Nothing would ever change Dave’s hatred of Ho Chi Min and his communist allies. America nurtured freedom for Eldridge as much as for Dave. “How can you say that?” he challenged. “The government just wants to liberate the people of Vietnam.”

“You’ve been programmed, young man. The United States army does internationally what police departments do locally. The way for the United States to liberate Vietnam is to leave. The war is nothing short of mass murder.”

Dave wanted to argue, yet his heart sank and his conviction waivered as graphic images played in his mind of villages in flames and napalmed villagers. Even then he couldn’t accept his country’s actions as murder. The army had its tactics and Dave’s job, when he joined, would be to implement the command’s strategy without questioning its reasons.

Eldridge led him into the production room of the organization’s newspaper, with bundled stacks of the latest edition ready for distribution. Dave picked up a hardcover book from the mantle over a fireplace: Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver, a picture of a serious Eldridge on the back of the jacket.

“I wrote that in Folsom Prison.”

On the inside flap a line from The New York Times called the essays in the book “brilliant and revealing.” As Eldridge spouted off more of his philosophy, one conflicting emotion followed another: admiration for the man’s dedication to helping others and revulsion at his espousal of Marxist claptrap. 

They continued on to the entryway and Jayden helped see him off. “I owe you one.”

“Remember,” the older man advised, “You have free will. You don’t have to believe everything you’ve been taught.”

He walked to the car dizzy from taking in all the information. Slumped over the steering wheel, distressing images of billy clubs striking defenseless bodies, horrific Vietnam war photos, and Eldridge’s exhortations all mingled together in a confusing jumble that pummeled him from within. He drove mechanically, depleted emotionally as much as physically, until he reached the comforting, upscale white world of north Berkeley and his uncle’s house. 

Inside, he gave his worried uncle a brief account of his day. He called his father when the evening rates kicked in at 5:00 p.m. 

Leaving out mention of Eldridge and the Black Panthers, he recounted how he got caught in the demonstration, how the police beat unarmed protesters, how he helped Jayden. “He said that any police officer would beat a protester with his baton if he was ordered to,” crediting Jayden with Eldridge’s assertion. “I told him you never would, and neither would anyone on the Edison Police Department.”

Silence on the other end of the line confronted him.

“Dad?”

“What’s right and what’s wrong isn’t always such a clear cut affair.”

The vagueness of the statement troubled him. “That’s true,’ he ventured, “but maiming unarmed people like they’re the Vietcong, that’s always wrong, isn’t it?”

“If America was invaded by Russia, would it be wrong to defend ourselves?”

“What does that have to do with beating up protesters?”

After a long pause, his father spoke. “I know a lot of well-meaning people disagree with you and me about the war. But others are out there using these protests to undermine the government and our way of life. You can’t always turn the other cheek.”

“The people I saw today didn’t have weapons. They didn’t invade anything except the street. You shouldn’t hurt people like that.”

“All things being equal, I don’t want to see anybody get hurt.”

“Then you’ve never done anything like what I saw today?”

Again his father made no reply.

“You’ve never done anything like that, have you?” Silence on the line. “Tell me you haven’t.”

“Sometimes keeping law and order is more important than what happens to particular individuals.” Now Dave held his tongue, waiting for his father to continue. “You remember the riots in Newark last year. They called our department to help when things got out of hand. You didn’t see what I saw. There were fires, smashed store windows, looting. People no better than animals.”

Animals? His father was talking about Black people. Mistreated inner city folks reacting to police brutality, Jayden had insisted. “What did you do?”

“We had our orders. We followed them. It wasn’t pretty but it was our job.”

“You used your baton?”

“Enough of this, Davie,” his mother broke in. He hadn’t realized she was listening. “Your father did what he had to do. He was only doing his duty. Just like you would do if you were in his place. You have no right to judge him.” 

Dave registered her irritation and his gut twisted into a knot. He held the receiver away from his ear and looked at it in disbelief as he wiped away tears. He feared hearing the details of his father’s actions as much as he feared listening to more excuses. He quickly ended the conversation.

Dave took a walk to clear his head on the steep, well-groomed streets. The peace and quiet of the late afternoon contrasted with his inner tumult. Everything he’d learned that day contradicted what he thought he knew. Eldridge told him any cop would beat Black people if his job required it, and his father verified it. They prosecuted former Nazis who defended their crimes by claiming they only followed orders. The truth about his father, who gave the same excuse, was excruciating. 

The movies that had played in Dave’s mind earlier returned, only this time he imagined his father as the cop beating Jayden. He walked aimlessly, paying no attention to the turns he made. He struggled to process it all as he passed well-kept houses set back from the street with manicured lawns and thick hedges with dark green leaves. He wondered how his relationship with his father would change. Could he look up to him any longer as a model to emulate? And his mother. She’d rushed to protect him as if acting as his second in a duel. Did her loyalty make it right?

He wound up on the serene university campus, where strolling couples increased his sense of isolation. Lost among the walkways and classical-style buildings, he wished he’d never accepted his uncle’s invitation to visit. Incapable of making sense of the day, he wondered if the larger American society might bear responsibility for the violence and mayhem of the last several years after all. 

In agonizing discomfort, he passed a soaring bell tower but hardly noticed, then walked under a wrought iron gateway into an expansive courtyard. Emotionally drained, he sat on the front steps of an immense building. A young woman selling red roses approached people sitting on the stone rim of a fountain a few yards away. They turned her away one after another, until a fellow bought a few and presented them to the girl at his side. Dave took in her expression of delight and the flower girl’s contented look as she walked away. Softly sobbing, he closed his eyes.

A number of statements by Eldridge Cleaver were taken from a talk given on October 4, 1968, and are used with permission of UCLA Department of Communication Archives.

About the author

Barry Fields is a psychologist who moved with his wife and dog from Santa Fe, New Mexico to retire in the Blue Ridge Mountains. His nonfiction articles on travel, food, and Southwest life appeared in a number of regional and national publications. His short story "A Matter of Justice" recently appeared in 34th Parallel Magazine and two short stories previously placed in short fiction contests. 

About the illustration

The illustration is "Police beating man, Harlem riots, 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue", 1964. Photograph taken by Dick DeMarsico for the New York World Telegraph & Sun. In the public domain.