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
Rambling Harbor 
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