Fight the Power: A Memoir of the Sixties

The author was raised as a Southern Baptist and Mormon convert, although he was always a non-believer. However, like everyone else in his blue collar surroundings, he believed in America, the military, anti-Communism, and, although too young to vote, Senator Barry Goldwater when he ran for president in 1964. Then, in the Sixties, he went to college and became swept up in the movements of the times. He came to realize that everything he’d believed about ＂his war,＂ the Vietnam War, was wrong. He came to believe that we were more than just on the ＂wrong side.＂ We were the wrong side. Eventually he was drafted. However, he refused induction into the military, preferring to face five years in prison, the maximum sentence, rather than fight in an immoral war. This memoir describes his journey through the Sixties, from a working class gung-ho Goldwater Republican supporter of the Vietnam War to a radicalized anti-war activist who was eventually drafted to fight in that war -- but refused to go.