Delivered at Pax Christi Metro New York Fall Assembly
(forgive all grammatical errors, as this was written to be spoken)
November 1, 2025
The first time I heard of Pax Christi, it was in the form of a warning: “Don’t engage with Pax Christi,” I was told. It was 2000 and early 2001. I was a 4/C midshipman, that is, a freshman navy ROTC student at Notre Dame. It was the lead up to the annual “pass in review,” a parade of the three ROTC branches in front of the university administration. Student members of Pax Christi, led by that rabble rouser priest Mike Baxter, had the audacity to suggest, in the school newspaper, and in small protests, that Notre Dame should not have a military parade on the main quad.
Pax Christi won, sort of. They wanted there to be no parade at all, and no ROTC units on campus. The compromise was that the parade was to be held indoors, again, at the Loftus Center.
“Do not engage,” our commanding officer told us, particularly when in uniform.
I still remember walking into the Loftus Center, in my summer whites, and there were Pax Christi and Pax Christi-adjacent students on both sides of the walkway. I didn’t engage. I didn’t make eye contact. I looked forward, steely-eyed, as if I was already marching in the parade.
Because of the uniforms, because of the parades, because of the army-navy game, and flyovers and air shows, because of the tulips in the Annapolis brochure, and national anthems and pledges of allegiance, because of Tom Clancy and Jack Ryan, Tom Cruise and Top Gun, …..by ninth grade I knew I wanted to go into the military. I could not articulate a strong reason other than “I wanted to serve my country,” and it was “an honorable path.” Why the navy specifically?... I felt there was a “romance of the sea,” and also all the best military movies, I thought, were navy-centered. They got me.
9/11 took place my sophomore year, a couple weeks after I signed on the line to confirm my commitment, and that day only affirmed my resolve to “serve.”
I had accepted the so called “common sense” behind the war in Afghanistan. I didn’t want to throw snow balls at the tents on South Quad like fellow midshipman Ryan Long joked about doing--tents erected by Pax Christi students to highlight the plight of Afghan refugees, made by our war . I thought these students were highlighting an important humanitarian concern. Concerns I would take with me when I would go to war. I could thread this needle, As the moderate philosopher-officer.
However, watching the Iraq war unfold, especially while I studied abroad in Cairo, away from the cheerleading US media: That’s when the cracks started forming in that resolve.
Coming back from Cairo and then spending my midshipman summer on a ship out of San Diego was disorienting. No one questioned the war. They cheered it on, to the degree they even thought about it. In the surface navy, we were at the same time part of the larger war machine but not really in harm’s way ourselves. Arm chair warriors of a sort. But because the particular ship I was on was not firing missiles, I had convinced myself that I could keep on threading this needle.
My senior year, I still kept my distance from Pax Christi. But I did start hanging out with Catholic Worker types. I was being drawn in by something stronger and better than the military propaganda that hooked me in my teens .
And so I would continue to struggle with this moral dilemma out in the actual navy--and hold that tension.
I still thought that the navy could use an enlightened officer like me. I was becoming more fluent in Arabic, I studied Islam and so-called Middle East history, I was a good liberal. Not like those Bush and Cheney-ite brutes. I was Notre Dame-Catholic-educated, where the “values” I learned in--I guess liturgy? In theology class?--would automatically make me make the right decision. I could help the navy be less brutish, and if push came to shove, I would not participate in an unjust invasion. Or an unjust missile launch.
In fact, I chose to go to the Middle East, closer to the crucible in Iraq, to a minesweeper in Bahrain. Wouldn’t it be better for me to go that way, since I was studying the language and the region? That tour of duty was supposed to be 27 months but then after two months, we got called to rotate back to Texas, near Corpus Christi. But not before I , in fine colonial fashion, attended a couple all-you-can-eat-and-champagne-drink brunches at the Radisson, with all the fellow off-duty officers, military contractors, and occasional wealthy Bahrainis and Saudis, all of us served by “Third Country Nationals,” i.e. underpaid S. and SE Asian guest workers.
Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, working onboard a broken ship, tied to the pier--that would be the actual crucible that formed me. We weren’t going anywhere, but we were ruled by our own Captain Ahab. From the top came the cut throat anxiety, Dehumanizing coerced labor, and often racialized language. Ahab acted as if we were at the “tip of the spear,” and this was made all the more absurd, because our broken little boat was so insignificant even by the navy’s own metrics.
After a long hot day of both extreme boredom and despair, if I didn’t have duty, I’d stop at the empty and open church on the way back home, to look for some rest. Our Lady of the Assumption. There, of all the things to turn to, I turned to the rosary. The rosary!? I was a liberal Catholic--I didn’t do the rosary. But that forced repetition of prayers became like a mantra that eventually led me into deeper and regular contemplation.
It was in contemplation where I sat with the reality that I was part of the war machine and it was going to be hard to survive it. And that it might break me. The far edge of it, but nevertheless part of the machine. Even for those who like the military, life in it is totalitarian, all consuming.
My dear friend Tami subscribed me to the Fellowship of Reconciliation magazine. Margie from the Catholic Worker sent me books on the murdered El Salvador Jesuits. Bill and Brendan sent me Dan Berrigan, Dorothy Day, and John Dear. One day, at the gun range no less, I was reading Michael Nagler’s Is There No Other Way? The search for a nonviolent future.
When he saw the book, my friend Ted, said with humor and kindness, “I think you’re in the wrong line of work.”
I found the one alternative, hippie coffee shop in Corpus, where I befriended Blue Feather, who became my Navajo spiritual healer and I his adopted grandson of sorts. I heard the music of David Rovics, and his “San Patricio Battalion.” I picked up Zinn and Chomsky from the library. I’d go to the beautiful Corpus Christi bay at night and stare off in peace. Beautiful despite the refineries. Then the next morning, I’d have to go face the ugly gray ship and the ugly captain.
In the summer of 2005, I began assembling an application for conscientious objection. I first told my parents and my closest friends, and they were all supportive. The base chaplain did not share my politics or my spirituality, but he was kind and was as supportive as he knew how to be. In my personal statement, explaining the change between willingly signing up for the navy and now wanting to get out of it was hard. How does one explain in a military application before what would be a military tribunal of sorts, that “long loneliness” Dorothy Day wrote about and lived. Loneliness during the midnight to 4am watch, with a 9mm on my hip, despite cracking jokes with the watch team. Loneliness during baseball game national anthems. Loneliness during Captain Ahab’s speeches. And loneliness during suburban Catholic homilies that did not challenge the war culture.
I had assembled the letters of support. I had Ben at the Catholic Worker, who also worked with the GI Rights hotline, review the application. It was ready to go, for Thursday, August 18. That was my goal.
On the Monday before--the 15th--I was called into the XO’s office. Did the chaplain leak my plans?
The XO offered me a new position on the ship: “first lieutenant,” or deck division officer. Andy was leaving for dive school, his position was now open, and the XO thought I might like this better than being the “Auxiliary engines officer” or “auxo.” He knew I hated being Auxo. “First LT” was definitely a better position, and with that, I could run the fitness and morale, welfare, and rec programs.
I said yes. I took it the XO’s invitation as a sign--but probably more of an out. An out to avoid any such sign. I would not submit my application for CO. I would clench my jaw, plug away, and get out in three years.
I no longer believed that the navy was an institution that could be reformed from within, certainly not by a junior office like me. But, if ever I would have to commit an immoral act, I told myself, I would stop then. I would risk it all then. I resigned myself to being part of the war machine, because it was a broken part of the machine, tied to the pier.
For my second and final tour, I decided to go to a cruiser, based out of Japan. I didn’t yet have the analysis to name my role in Japan--or Bahrain, or Tejas for that matter--as occupier. Nor to see the violence in just my being there, in US military uniform.
In addition to the just grueling life at sea--the USS Cowpens actually worked and we were out to sea a lot--several experiences from that tour stand out:
Doing circles off the coast of Taiwan during its elections; visiting Hiroshima and eerie peace of the A-bomb dome at night; a boozy brunch in Okinawa--doubly colonized by Japan and then the US; a sailor from our ship murdering a Japanese taxi cab driver; protesters greeting us in Sydney--reminiscient of Pax Christi at Notre Dame six years; I didn’t engage this time either, but by then, I wanted to actually join them.
And then one seemingly small thing still stands out, from the Cowpens’ history on the brochure for the friends and family day cruise.
“The USS Cowpens fired 37 missiles during the ‘shock and awe’ phase of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’”
It was written as an accolade for the ship, a milestone in its history. For our friends and families to soak in as they walked the passage ways and enjoyed hamburgers on the back of the ship.
Three years had gone by between those 37 missiles and my arrival on the Cowpens, but the connections--and the entanglement in this filthy rotten system--was made clear.
I got out of the navy in 2008. In the years since, I have become an active member of Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans against the war (formerly IVAW). I now teach high school and try to have soft counter-recruiting conversations with my students, who live in an over-recruited district. Soft, because for many of them, it is their only economic option. I can’t judge them. After all, I did it, and I didn’t get out even when I maybe should have.
So, I didn’t submit that CO application. Did I get cold feet or was I not truly a CO? I think both are true.
If I submitted the application, everything in my life would have been upended, at least for a time, and I lacked the courage to face the shame, real or imagined, of being “that guy who didn’t finish their time.” How could I explain that long loneliness to everyone?
And while war is always sinful and can hardly ever be just and while I have dedicated my life to stopping war, I’m not entirely a pacifist. I don’t know if I would have preached pacifism to Nat Turner or to Marek Edelman of the Warsaw Ghetto. But maybe I can hold those two contradictory truths at the same time. So I don’t know if I was actually a CO.
As I close, I did want to introduce a new campaign led by About Face, and this is the “Right to Refuse.” We are working with the Military Law Task Force, Veterans for Peace and other allies to build legal protections around the right to refuse unjust military orders. In the immediate, we have the deployment of national guard troops to our streets in mind. But also, we are thinking of the current extrajudicial killings happening in the Caribbean and a potential larger US war on Venezuela. The “right to refuse” would establish a sort of “selective conscientious objector” legal status.
It is obviously a tall task. We don’t believe in veteran epistemology--that we necessarily have some special knowledge and that people should listen to what we say. But, nevertheless, many Americans do worship vets (which is weird), and so this is our lane in the current struggle. We see the R2R campaign as an organizing strategy too, along the way, to make some cracks in this fascism enveloping our country. But Pax Christi--and About Face-- and folks here know that our crisis is much deeper than Trump.
