Category: Danbury FCI

Gridiron for Leg Irons

In the winter of
Nineteen hundred and sixty-four
Something was going on,
Called the Vietnam War.

But all we could hear,
At the stadium that night
Was the roar of the crowd,
As we continued our fight.

But older friends
Had joined the fray,
And died in a swamp
Many worlds away.

The play was called.
And I started my run.
As another friend died
Under the gun.

The play I remember
Was Buck-forty-five
As the government kept telling
Us, lie after lie.

Then came the day
They said I must go.
But I stood on the line and shouted
My NO!!

They locked me in chains,
Both hands and
Both feet.
But the mind of the boy
Would not face defeat.

The judge said,
Son, “What will you do?”
I said, “Your honor.
It is all up to you.”

If you think I was wrong, then
To jail, I must go.
If you believe I was right
There’s a great Broadway show.
Perhaps we could go.

And with those words
In the blink of an eye
I traded the gridiron
For leg irons
And two years
At Danbury FCI.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

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I Was There When the Soup Was Still steaming, and now I’m steaming

Father J. Edward Guinan didn’t start a charity. He started a rebellion wrapped in mercy.

In 1970, fresh from the Paulist Council and the restless spirit of George Washington University, Guinan and a handful of students opened the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV)—a communal home dedicated to radical service, protest, and poetic resistance. His vision was seismic and straightforward:
“To resist the violent; to gather the gentle; to help free compassion and mercy and truth from the stockades of our empire.”

I joined not long after being released from Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, where I’d served time for refusing induction into the Vietnam War. That refusal wasn’t just political—it was spiritual. I walked out of Danbury with a record and a rhythm, and CCNV gave me a place to put both.

We met at the Newman Center, planned protests like prayers, and fed strangers like family. The Zacchaeus Community Kitchen had just opened near the White House, and Mother Teresa—not yet a household name—came quietly to serve the first bowls of soup. She sat with the guests. That was enough.

In 1973, we launched the Hospitality House, offering medical care to the homeless. It wasn’t a clinic—it was a promise. We fed 200, sometimes 300 people a day. Seven days a week. No grants. Just grit.


By 1974, we opened Euclid House, a communal living space and organizing hub. We fasted for famine relief. We slept on floors. We argued about scripture and soup recipes. We were broke, burning with purpose, and building a sanctuary from scraps.

And now—in 2025—I find myself thinking about those days more than ever. The government is shut down. SNAP benefits are expiring. Families are forced to choose between rent and food. Shelters are full. The hunger we fought in 1973 is still here—just dressed in new bureaucracy.

And I’m mad as hell.
Not just at the politicians who play chicken with people’s lives.
But in the silence. The scrolling. The shrugging.
The way we let hunger become background noise.
Where is the outrage?
Where is the yelling on social media?
Where is the mercy?

CCNV wasn’t perfect. But it was real. It was radiant.
And I was there when the steam rose from the first pot,
when protest became presence,
and when mercy moved in.
You don’t have to go out and get arrested.
You don’t have to directly feed the hungry.
You don’t have to open your home to the homeless.
But for Christ’s sake—YELL.

Yell at the fat-cat politicians who play with poor people’s lives like it’s a game.
Yell like someone’s life depends on it.
Because it does.
Rambling Harbor is where memory meets resistance.
Where soup becomes scripture.
Where sanctuary is stitched from scraps.

I was there.
And I’m still here.
And I’m still yelling.
I’m no longer at CCNV. I’m not peeling potatoes or stirring soup.
But like in the movie Network—the one someone asked about the other day—I’m still yelling.
Through my posts. Through my websites. Through my letters to Congress.
I am yelling that I am mad as hell.
And if you’re not—
You could be.
You should be.

And for Christ’s sake, don’t tell me not to call the fat cats fat
When children are skinny from need.
I’m yelling.
And you could too.

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Introduction

I never meant to write a war story. I meant to live a life. Not the kind that ends up in textbooks or on movie screens, but the kind shaped by quiet choices—by sitting down when others stepped forward, by saying no when silence was easier. This book isn’t about the Vietnam War or the peace movement. Those stories already fill libraries. It’s not about my years behind the mic as a radio broadcaster—that came later. Nor is it about the loud ones: the noisemakers, the celebrities, the politicians, or the filmmakers chasing spotlight and legacy.

This book is about quiet defiance. About extraordinary moments tucked inside an otherwise ordinary life. Mine.

During the Vietnam War era, roughly 570,000 young men were labeled draft offenders. Of those, 210,000 were formally charged. Just 8,750 were convicted. And only 3,250 were jailed. Less than one percent. This book is about that final group—the ones history rarely names, Hollywood never casts, and textbooks barely mention. It’s about my friend Kevin, who said, when we reconnected after Daniel Berrigan’s passing in 2016, “Dan, we didn’t go after the government; they came after us. We just wanted to live our lives.” Kevin was right. We wanted to live, and we wanted the boys sent to fight in a war we didn’t choose to live also.

I’m proud to say I was one of the 3,250 who said no. We said it quietly, but loud enough to keep our souls intact while they locked up our bodies. I tell only my part of the story, but I know I’m not so different from the other 3,249. Maybe I can make a little noise for all of us.

I once asked my father what happens when we die. We were walking a dirt road in the Deep South, the heat thick as molasses. I was nine. My dad, a scientist in spirit and mind, told me energy can’t be created or destroyed—it only changes form. Since the human body is mostly energy, it too must become something else. That left me with the unsettling idea that I might not become a mighty oak, but a daffodil on the side of a hill. Maybe my life has been a long attempt to be the oak, not the daffodil. But the jury’s still out.

I never planned to oppose a war, and I certainly never intended to write a book. If I had, maybe I would’ve kept a diary—or at least some decent notes. What few I scribbled on barroom napkins or in stray notebooks are long gone, buried in some landfill. Hopefully, raising a mighty oak. But I do remember a few things.

I’ll tell you about growing up on Staten Island—football, beaches, music, and radio. A middle-class kid with few worldly cares and a head full of books. My first dream was to be a radio star. That dream shifted when friends started coming home in body bags—boys who could run, jump, and catch with the best of us, now still forever.

I’ll try to explain how a painfully shy kid found the courage to sit down instead of stepping forward at Whitehall Station—the military induction center in New York City where young men were processed for the draft. The routine was simple: They underwent a written aptitude test and a physical examination to determine fitness for service.

Based on these evaluations, they were classified (e.g., 1-A for fit, 4-F for unfit). When your name was called, you stepped forward to begin your journey into military service. But I didn’t. I sat down. I don’t know if fear buckled my knees or if I’d read somewhere that sitting was the perfect nonviolent act. Maybe it was both. Either way, that quiet refusal marked the beginning of my resistance.

I’ll take you from New York to the mountains of West Virginia, to a woman named Emily who taught me how to live off the land. Then, to a woman older than I was, with three children, about her, and the court fight for custody of her kids and one of mine. I’ll tell you about my arrest in Hollywood and the cross-country ride back to New York, escorted by U.S. marshals. And the old judge who nearly begged me to take one of his get-out-of-jail-free cards.

I’ll talk about meeting Daniel and Phillip Berrigan in prison. And how resistance didn’t end behind bars, as shown by my trips to solitary confinement for refusing to walk the prison lines. I’ll tell you about fellow inmates like Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and Clifford Irving—and the handful of other draft and war resisters. I’ll finish with life after prison.

3,249 other stories may or may not be told. This one is mine.

Dan Sanders

July 2025

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Rating: 1 out of 5.

CHAPTER TWO: MEETING EMILY

I met Emily in the fall of 1967, during the anti-war march on the Pentagon. That protest—tens of thousands strong—was a rupture. D.C. felt electric and volatile, like the air before a lightning strike. The war was surging, and so was the resistance. Students, clergy, veterans, poets, and provocateurs collided, not always in harmony. The movement was splintering: some preached peace, others demanded revolution. Everyone wanted change, but no one agreed on its shape.

Several years before this, I started writing letters to my draft board. Lyndon B. Johnson was still president, Nixon waiting in the wings. The letters weren’t meant for Johnson, but I imagined him reading them anyway—grimacing, maybe, before tossing them aside. The draft board replied a few times, reminding me I was deferred under 3-A college status. Eventually, they recalculated me as 1-A. Combat-ready. And I welcomed it. You can’t refuse what hasn’t been offered. I was done hiding behind loopholes.

I’ve never had patience for those who ran to Canada, claimed bone spurs, or found clever ways to dodge the draft. If others were saying yes by dying, I could damn well risk my freedom to say no—with my body, not just my words. That was the point. Resistance isn’t clean. It’s not comfortable. It’s not supposed to be.

I first met a friend of Emily’s who invited me to speak at George Washington University about my involvement. Emily was there. Back of the room. Silent. Motionless. She claimed a corner as if it were a refuge. Twenty, maybe twenty-five people in a vast lecture hall. Most clustered together, ready to pounce. She stood apart. Her small frame held a quiet strength.

As I spoke, the questions came hard—verbal rotten tomatoes, launched like missiles. Who was I to think I could end a war? Why did I care? I was safe. I was free. But I kept looking toward her. She hadn’t said a word, yet
I felt held by her silence.

And then she spoke. Softly. Simply. Powerfully.

“Wouldn’t you want them to do the same for you,” she said, “if it were your children being napalmed?”

That sentence still echoes. In 1967, napalm wasn’t theoretical—it was the image on the evening news, the smell in the back of our throats. Her words cut through the noise like truth often does. Amid the shouting, she was the still point.

We met again later that year at another protest in New York City. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking at Riverside Church. That speech—his first significant break with the Johnson administration—was a thunderclap. He called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” It cost him allies, but it galvanized many of us. Emily and I never saw him speak. Instead, we ended up at Coney Island—my first and only time there.

She convinced me to ride the Parachute Jump, a steel skeleton of a tower that looked like it had been designed by someone with a grudge against gravity. Two-person canvas seat. Lifted 250 feet into the sky. Dropped like a stone. Caught, eventually, by a parachute that felt more like a suggestion than a guarantee.

She said it would be fun. I said yes, mostly to impress her. It was not fun. It was terrifying. But she laughed, hugged me, and called me brave. Said it was one of the best experiences of her life. I didn’t understand how she could enjoy it. But I was falling for her faster than that drop from the tower. Before we parted, she told me: if I ever needed a safe place, she had land in West Virginia.

The Pentagon was thunder. Riverside was lightning. But Emily—Emily was shelter. In the roar of fractured movements and rising resistance, she offered stillness. Her words didn’t shout; they landed like balm. Even that wild ride at Coney Island, terrifying as it was, became a metaphor: the world drops you, but sometimes you’re caught—not by canvas or steel, but by someone who sees you.

Before we parted, she offered land in West Virginia—a place untouched by sirens or slogans. A sanctuary. And I began to wonder: maybe the revolution wasn’t just in the streets. Perhaps it was also in the quiet spaces we build with each other.

After more than fifty years, I’ve learned that quiet doesn’t always live in geography. Sometimes it’s tucked into memory, into rituals that outlast the hands that once performed them. And sometimes, it’s the comfort and warmth of remembering the people who held me when the world did not.

Maybe that’s the revolution too—not just in the streets, but in the stillness we carry forward.

And the real question is this: when the world lets you down, who catches you?

A mountain. A mouse. A friend on a grimy sidewalk. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Chapter 3:Whitehall Station Army Induction Center

My father died in December 1967. Cancer. A slow, cruel thief that stole him piece by piece until all that remained was silence. I was twenty-one, and the world was already loud with war.

The night before my induction, sleep refused to visit. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling like it owed me answers. My heart was a metronome gone rogue—too fast, too loud, too erratic. I tried counting breaths, replaying old football games, pretending I was anywhere but here. But dread crept under the door and settled in my bones. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was scared of disappearing—of becoming a number, a uniform, a cog in a machine I didn’t believe in.

The draft lottery, America’s twisted game show of fate, didn’t begin until December 1, 1969. But in 1964, the draft was still operating under a local board system, where deferments (for college, hardship, etc.) and classifications were manually reviewed. In 1964, when I was eighteen, I burned my college deferment draft card, thinking I was making a statement. At the same time, I began writing letters to the President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, expressing my opposition to the war and to my draft board on Staten Island, requesting reclassification to 1-A. You can’t refuse what you haven’t been offered. And I was tired of, if not exactly hiding behind loopholes, then at least I was tired of accepting them.

I was writing the first line of a much longer story. By ’69, they changed my deferment and reclassified me 1A—fit for service, next in line to toe the line, or not. I was on the verge of something, though I couldn’t name it. It had taken me 5 years between business schools and seminaries to get here. I think of that time as going from the gridiron to leg irons.

And then the morning came. I was up and gone by 6 am. I wasn’t sleeping anyway, leaving a note for my mother, telling her I had gone to visit friends. I wondered how long I really would be gone. I took the bus to the Staten Island Ferry, which crosses the Hudson River. Whitehall Station was about two blocks from the Ferry terminal. It must have been the longest two blocks I have ever walked, and the slowest. I was in no hurry. Just writing about that morning, I can still feel that god-awful, sinking, sick feeling in my stomach; I can’t do this.

You’ve heard of the fight-or-flight response. Mine was freeze and fall. No exit. Just a heart pounding like a drumline on speed, and a cliff edge I couldn’t see the bottom of. I was about to dive into the dark. Compared to this, the Coney Island Parachute Jump was a kiddie ride.

Whitehall Station sat in lower Manhattan like a bureaucratic bunker—the Army’s induction center where boys became soldiers, or tried not to. It shut down on May 18, 1972, two days before my birthday, while I was sitting in the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, partly because I wanted it torn down and had done my best to see that happen.

As I walked up the last few steps to enter the building, I found Mr. Harold Jones waiting outside Whitehall Station. My eighth-grade science teacher, yes—but more than that, over my high school years, and not really having anyone else to talk to who seemed to understand what I was feeling, Mr. Jones became my confidant and my co-conspirator in resistance. He had made science feel like storytelling, helped along by a fictional mouse named Archibald MacLeish who lived in his coat closet. Archibald, named after the poet and war veteran, wore a French beret, a red bandana, and carried a cane. No one ever saw him, but I did. I still do. He walks proudly, head high, like he knows something the rest of us don’t. We said very little to each other that morning. I thank him for being there. He said something about me staying me, it was something to be proud of.

The induction ceremony began. The room smelled of sweat and floor wax. The air was thick with the breath of boys pretending not to shake. The recruiter’s voice was flat, rehearsed, like he’d stopped listening after the first hundred times. Repeat after me, he began.

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution…”

He barked it out. Repeat? Hell, I could barely breathe. I needed time. I needed space. I needed something other than this.

“…that I will bear true faith…”

And suddenly I wasn’t in Whitehall anymore. I was back on the football field, hearing my coach yell, “Go in hell-bent for leather, Little Sandy!” My dad was Big Sandy. The coach used that nickname to rile me up. Hell-bent for leather. Hell-bent for leather. My heart picked up the chant, louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else.

Then came the words: “Step forward.”

I sat down.

The recruiter blinked, confused. Thought I was sick. I stood up, then sat again.

“I’m not moving,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I could if I wanted to. The sergeant’s face seemed to turn fire-engine red with anger.

My heart was a jackhammer. I was frozen in defiance—or maybe just fear. Either way, I wasn’t going forward.

Two MPs grabbed me like a sack of potatoes and hauled me to a holding cell. I was questioned by some army lawyer type who wanted me to be sure I knew what I was doing, and I asked him if he was sure if he knew what he was doing. Then came the police car, the ride to Staten Island, and my first night in jail. From the gridiron to the county jail—five miles apart, a lifetime between.

As I was carried out of Whitehall Station, I had started refusing to walk. Part of my plan was total non-cooperation. Mr. Jones stood on the grimy New York sidewalk. He smiled. Gave me a thumbs-up. And from between some cop’s gun holster and his arm, I flashed him a peace sign.

And just behind him, in the blur of sirens and sidewalk noise, I saw Archibald MacLeish.

Not in a coat closet this time—but strutting down the curb in his beret and red bandana, cane tapping a rhythm only I could hear. He paused, tipped his hat, and whispered, “Courage isn’t loud, Sandy. It’s the quiet refusal.”

Then he vanished into the crowd.

That image is etched deeper than any classroom memory.

Mr. Jones arranged to bail me out, or hoped I’d be released on my own recognizance. I was up the next morning with a trial date set. I ended up at his home for the rest of the day—resting, recovering, trying to make more sense of what had just happened. But more importantly, what would happen next?

To my mother, I was simply visiting Mr. Jones. I was old enough to say, “Don’t call my parents,” and the authorities obliged.

A trial date was set for April. The lead-up was a blur of paperwork, legal advice, and quiet panic. I walked the streets of Manhattan like a ghost, memorizing the cracks in the sidewalk, the rhythm of subway trains, the smell of roasted peanuts from corner carts—anything to anchor me. I had oddly always found the Financial District of Manhattan relaxing on a Sunday morning. The insanity of Wall Street gave way to peace and silence. I walked Wall Street a few times in those last days in New York, and of course, Times Square, the lights of Broadway were not going to shine on me, but they do shine inside of me in my heart and memory. Just as the beaches of Staten Island still call to me.. I didn’t know what I was looking for, only that it wasn’t in New York anymore.

I got a message to Emily at a Post Office Box in Alderson, and I asked if her mountain was still standing. In a week, she answered. She said yes, with directions at least for the ones that were for the roads.. So I packed up and headed south, winding through the back roads past Alderson, deep into the West Virginia woods. I wasn’t running. I was regrouping. The mountain had always been there—quiet, steady, like Emily herself. And in that silence, I could breathe again.

The last stretch to Emily’s cabin was a two-mile hike up a narrow trail—no road, no signs, just the hush of the woods and the crunch of my boots on leaves. Each step peeled away the noise of the city, the courtroom, the cell. I carried no map, but the mountain knew the way. By the time I reached the clearing, my breath had steadied, and something in me had begun to loosen.

The mountain didn’t ask for explanations. It didn’t care about draft classifications, courtroom dates, or the ache behind my eyes. It just stood there—solid, indifferent, eternal. Emily met me at the porch with a mug of hot cider and a silence that felt like a gift of grace. I sat down, let the steam rise, and listened to the wind move through the trees like a hymn. Somewhere in that hush, I heard the tap of a cane on stone. Archibald MacLeish, beret tilted just so, stepped out from behind an old oak tree and said, “You made it, Sandy. Not by marching, not by hiding—but by listening.” He tipped his hat, winked, and vanished again

And for the first time in months, that night I slept.

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Rating: 1 out of 5.