NEW YORK COLUMNIST DESCRIBES PETRICK CASE
(Murray Kempton, for many years a featured columnist of the liberal New York Post devoted his column of May 19 to the case of Howard Petrick.
[Kempton's account, carried under the ironic title, "The Bad Soldier," is as follows. ]
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Howard Petrick has been in the Army of the United States since last July and has 13 months still to go. So far as his performance of duty is concerned, none of it is likely to be bad time. He is one of those young men with glasses whom M.P.s never bother to ask to show their passes.
At Fort Hood, Texas, they made him a cook, and he was such a model of discipline and containment that he could even get along with his mess sergeants.
Last April, this model career was suddenly interrupted; and Howard Petrick now a PFC, was transferred to an inactive unit, for which he goes on about his duties as a cook.
In the meanwhile, the army wonders whether to carry through the courtmartial which could bring him five years in prison.
Howard Petrick was a public member of the Socialist Workers Party awaiting trial for distributing antiwar literature without a Minneapolis peddler's license when he was inducted into the army. He told the army that he had no objection to being drafted, but that he could not take the oath of allegiance and that, on his own time, without disobeying any order, he intended to go on expressing his objections to the war.
The inducting officer answered, "There'll be no infringements on your rights; you'll have the same ones you do in civilian life." The oath was waived.
His infantry basic training was normal, although the drill instructors were pleasanter than usual and franker in saying that most of it was useless.
When he settled down at Fort Hood, Petrick put his antiwar and socialist books on open shelves next to his bunk and kept a large pamphlet file in his footlocker. He does not seem to have thrust the war into his conversations with the other enlisted men. "It was," he recollects, however, "very hard to find anyone who'd argue in favor of the war."
One morning at inspection, a new officer checked Howard Petrick's footlocker and saw his pamphlets. He picked up a "Bring the boys home" leaflet and showed it to the first sergeant. "Yes, I know about that," said the first sergeant hastily. "Come on, sir." That was the end of the matter.
In April, Howard Petrick took his leave to serve as a voting delegate to the convention of the Young Socialist Alliance. When he came back, he found that his barracks had been subject to a shakedown inspection and the contents of his locker confiscated.
Howard Petrick was called to the orderly room and put to the questions. The investigators were vaguely apologetic about having emptied his footlocker; not being able to find him and tell him, they had just gone ahead in his absence. Some of his pamphlets were found in the footlockers of five other soldiers, who were thereupon segregated and put under guard for a day.
Then everybody seemed to forget the whole matter; Petrick was sent off to an inactive company to cook. He is being treated with correct indifference for the moment; any day now, of course, the charges could be brought against hin.
In logic, to be sure, he will have to be tried. His thoughts, although not his conduct, are disloyal by the standards of the army. Last week, he was granted another leave and went to Chicago to speak against the war. He wore his uniform. "I figured," he says, "that if General Westmoreland can wear his uniform and speak for the war, I can wear mine and speak against it."
And, in Washington, the Defense Department wonders about court-martialing him. It is understandably slow to decide. To try Howard Petrick will be to confess that the war has turned us into a country where a man can be a criminal not for what he does, but for what he thinks and says when asked.
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