It’s Memorial Day 2025, a holiday dedicated to U.S. military personnel who died in the line of duty, as opposed to Veterans Day, which is dedicated to those who lived through their service and, in many cases, deeply regret it. It’s impossible for us to know whether those who did make what they were taught was the ultimate sacrifice for their nation did feel the same regret.
For one soldier in particular, this sacrifice was not made willingly. Eddie Slovik, born to a Polish family in Detroit in 1920, was the only member of the US armed forces to be executed for desertion in WWII. Eddie was not the first nor the last man to desert. As he said himself on the way to the firing line, ” They’re not shooting me for deserting the United States Army, thousands of guys have done that. They just need to make an example out of somebody and I’m it because I’m an ex-con. I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that’s what they are shooting me for. They’re shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old.”
This is the hometown hero whom I’m choosing to memorialize. This act of cowardice exposed the whole rotten structure of the draft system. The monopoly of violence that lies in its core. I know it feels like something long banished to the dustbin of history, but how many such other specters have come back in recent years to haunt us? As long as the US government has the authority of life and death, the draft is still on the table, and if it does come back, it’s not necessarily going to be limited to cismen.
Who’s to say that you or I, those who have been indoctrinated into the cult of self interest since birth, won’t make the truly self interested decision at the critical moment? Who’s to say that we wouldn’t be one of the many who chose to desert?
Brigadier General E. C. McNeil, the senior Army lawyer in the European theater, wrote of Slovik: “His subsequent conduct shows a deliberate plan to secure trial and incarceration in a safe place. The sentence adjudged was more severe than he had anticipated, but the imposition of a less severe sentence would only have accomplished the accused’s purpose of securing his incarceration and consequent freedom from the dangers which so many of our armed forces are required to face daily.”
Looking back through the Neoliberal haze of the subsequent decades it seems preposterous that the American army ever expected Americans do anything beyond their most narrow and crass self interest. They’d eventually find this out the hard way in Vietnam.
And Slovak would find out the hard way, too. McNeil goes on to write that his ” unfavorable civilian record indicates that he is not a worthy subject of clemency.” Lt. Col. Henry J. Sommer, the division judge advocate writes, “The death sentence is deemed appropriate in this case. The accused is a habitual criminal.” Both officials show us who they deemed disposable. Surely some of the other 50,000 who deserted, 21,000 convicted and 48 whose death sentences were commuted came from good families. Good boys with good futures ahead of them.
I wonder what type of man Mr. Slovik would have grown up to become. Would he have been among the majority of Americans who opposed the Vietnam war? Would he have been among those who fought and failed to preserve Poletown from the now-downsized GM plant? Would he have been a dutiful husband? His widow Antoinette was a dutiful wife. She lobbied for his repatriation and presidential pardon her entire life. Eddie Slovik was buried in
the notorious Plot E of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery along with those guilty of truely unspeakable war crimes. The body was returned two years after her own burial in Woodlawn, but the pardon was never granted.
Local history is worth memorializing, whether it’s pretty or not. I’ve painted a sympathetic portrait of Eddie Slovik, while others may look at the same facts and see a Yellow Bellied Coward. Either way, he has lessons to teach us, especially as the spectre of World War seems to loom larger day by day. You just need to turn on the news to see what a contemporary draft looks like, and the harsh reprisals meted out to draft dodgers, whether they be Ukrainian, Russian, or the conscientious objectors of Israel.
We’ve lost much of the democratic powers that made resistance to the Vietnam draft possible, and even then, that took the better part of a decade. We need to be ready and able to resist the call to draft lest we face the same deadly crucible as Pvt. Eddie Slovik.
