Jon Varat – Fire Direction Officer – Part One
Lt. Jon Varat at LZ Sherry
From King to Peasant
I was in my second semester of law school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 when President Johnson issued the executive order ending graduate student deferments. My entire class got reclassified 1-A. A little more than a year later, two weeks before final exams for my second year in law school, I was about to be drafted. In the meantime, I had made a deal with the Army called the delayed option program. I enlisted to go to OCS and become an officer, but did not have to report for duty for three months.
Importantly for me that allowed me to finish my second year. And it allowed me to go west that summer of 1969 to work at O’Melveny & Myers, a major law firm in Los Angeles. All of a sudden things opened up for me in a way I never could have anticipated. Warren Christopher was the senior partner at the firm, and they put me on a project with him involving the Stanford Research Institute.
At this time Warren Christopher had just completed a term as Deputy Attorney General for President Lyndon Johnson. Later in his career he would go on to serve in the state department for two presidents: as Deputy Secretary of State for Jimmy Carter, and as the 63rd Secretary of State for Bill Clinton.
Chris, as he was known, had gone to Stanford law school and was asked to figure out a way to separate the research organization from the university. This relates to the Vietnam War because the university did not like its research institute being connected to the war. It turned out to be a very interesting legal project, one of many that summer. Just as formative for me, I thought I would like to have a career like his: sometimes in public service in Washington and sometimes in private practice back in LA.
In law school I turned out to be a good student. And I must have done some nice work for the firm, because before leaving O’Melveny & Myers for the service they were nice enough to say, We want you to come work for us. I told them I had a commitment of almost three years in the Army, then I’ve got to finish another year of law school and possibly a clerkship after that. They said: We don’t care. If it’s five years or six years, we want you. They really treated me like royalty, like I had never been treated before. At the end of the summer I went from there, where I was treated like a king, to basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood Missouri, where I was not treated like a king.
After basic I went to Ft. Sill for Advanced Individual Training, and then Officer Candidate School there. Just as I was starting OCS in January of 1970 I got a letter from Warren Christopher updating me on our work the previous summer. This guy who was very famous, very important and very busy, bothered to send me a letter at Ft. Sill. Now that is recruiting!
Searching the Soul
I got my commission in June 1970, and immediately my first orders were for Vietnam, which I was anticipating. I was a terminally serious kind of guy (and still am). When I got those orders I had not yet figured out whether I was a conscientious objector or not. I needed to figure out who I was and what I should do. If I was really a conscientious objector this was the time to say something.
I had some time off and went out to LA and stayed with a buddy who had been in Vietnam. He had gone to Yale law school and was in military intelligence for a couple years. I thought I needed to figure this out, so I bought a couple of books on conscientious objection. I knew the rule that selective conscientious objection was not good enough. You could not object to just a particular war like Vietnam, you had to be against all war. That was the law at the time and I knew the law and cared about it. I knew I was not a total conscientious objector because of the whole Hitler thing: if someone’s coming up the street to kill my family I am going to shoot you. I am probably one of the few people who sat on a beach in Santa Monica reading conscientious objection books trying to decide. I decided, No I am not a conscientious objector, so I’m going.
Another thing was important to me. I am a true believer in representative democracy. I feel that even if I lose elections and other people come along and ask things I don’t like but that are legitimate, then I need to do my duty. In the same way that if my guys win, I hope other people will do their duty. My own code says you have got to look in the mirror every morning and be OK with the guy looking back. I’ve tried to live my life that way. I did not like the war, but it was a legitimate decision for the U.S. to enter Vietnam. I did not like either side in the war, and I did not oppose or support the war. I was in the middle. It came down to my duty, so I went.
