“I didn’t want to kill anybody,” Eric Nagler says. “And I was afraid if I did go in that, because I was a pacifist, I’d get sent to the front lines and shot. So anyway, I dodged the draft.”
Nagler, who is now 83, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s. Like millions of young American men, he was draft-age when U.S. ground troops first set foot in Vietnam in 1965. “My brother came home from university one day and said that he was a conscientious objector and explained what that was,” Nagler says. “I thought it was a terrific idea.
