The Nov. 1, 1965 issue of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, an influential Washington newsletter of the period, carried a story headlined, “A Priest Tells How Our Bombers Razed His Church and Killed His People.”

From a Saigon hospital bed, a French priest recounted U.S. planes destroying his Vietnam village in devastating detail. Fleeing with surviving women and children, Father Currien “buried as best I could the bodies of my faithful…seven of them completely torn to bits. I had to abandon some wounded and dying.”

Sitting in their Govans kitchen the next day, Norman Morrison and his wife, Anne, read the interview with the priest. Quakers troubled by the war’s atrocities, both were already active in the nascent anti-war movement, demonstrating, writing letters, and refusing to pay federal taxes.

Norman, a former seminarian with a deep social conscience, hadn’t been feeling well that morning as it was. He had slept in before informing the Stony Run Friends Meeting where he served as executive secretary that he wouldn’t be in that day. Instead, he spent the hours before lunch with Anne preparing notes for a New Testament class he was to present the following week.

“What can we do that we haven’t done,” he asked his wife over French onion soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

The conversation turned to more pleasant topics, including plans for Christmas. Then, out of the blue, Anne Morrison Welsh would recall in her memoir, Held in the Light: Norman Morrison’s Sacrifice for Peace and His Family’s Journey of Healing, he asked what she’d do if anything happened to him.

That afternoon, she picked up the couple’s two oldest children at school. When she left, her husband’s head was buried in his class notes while their 11-month-old, Emily, napped. By the time she had returned home and began making dinner, Norman was dead.

The 31-year-old father of three had driven to The Pentagon, poured kerosene over himself, and lit himself on fire—beneath Secretary of Defense John McNamara’s window, it turned out. Only at the last minute, according to eyewitnesses, had her husband safely set his baby daughter aside.

Accompanied by two friends, Anne drove to the Fort Myer clinic that served The Pentagon. She gathered the unharmed Emily (Norman had left extra bottles, diapers, and a blanket in the car he borrowed). She declined speak to the press, but released a statement expressing her husband’s concern over the suffering caused by the war and that his action was a protest against U.S. involvement.

Inside Norman’s clothing, investigators discovered an invitation to a Quaker meeting with “How Can We Prevent World War III” handwritten on the back and a second note to himself: “As we go stronger materially, we get weaker morally. Few would disagree.”

Norman’s self-immolation echoed those of Buddhist monks in Vietnam and 82-year-old peace activist Alice Herz’s similar sacrifice in Detroit nine months earlier.

The startling action by someone who seemed like an average American made international news and shook the consciousness of the country. It also vexed those who knew him, caused others to question its morality and efficacy—and shattered his family.

The day after her husband died, Anne received a letter which he had mailed en route to D.C.

Dearest Anne, please don’t condemn me…I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown, as clearly as I was shown that Friday night in August 1955, that you would be my wife…

The letter did not help Anne, who described a curtain of grief descending around her. Politically, she would learn many years later, the protest had made a profound impact on at least one person at The Pentagon.

“I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even my family. I knew [they] shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war,” McNamara admitted in his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He also acknowledged his doubts about the war began that same month.

Healing for Anne and their daughters (their son died of cancer at 16) did not come until 1999, when they accepted an invitation to Vietnam. The unimaginable protest had been a beacon of hope for the North Vietnamese, who issued a stamp and named a street in her husband’s honor after his sacrifice. Poets penned works in commemoration and schoolchildren learned his name, which remained alive in Vietnamese hearts decades after his passing.

“I was in my bunker in the jungle that night when news of Morrison’s death in America came over Liberation Radio,” a former North Vietnamese soldier turned Hanoi University linguistics professor told Anne, after quietly approaching her during her visit. “I just sat there and cried. That someone in America cared enough about us that he would give up his life…”

Sometimes the best way to call attention to an historical injustice is through bold entertainment. That’s certainly what the great American auteur Spike Lee has in mind with Da 5 Bloods. On its most essential level, it’s an adventure film, about four Vietnam vet buddies returning to Ho Chi Minh City to look for buried treasure (gold bricks issued by the American government to thank the South Vietnamese for assisting them in the war), as well as the remains of their best friend and squad leader, Stormin’ Norman Holloway, who died in battle. But it’s also about the racist legacy of that terrible war—Black soldiers were disproportionately placed on the front lines to die, even as they were being discriminated against on American soil—and the way trauma never really leaves you. As far as our four heroes are concerned, the American government owes them that gold.

The film starts off on a light-hearted note, as the four grizzled friends (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) meet up at the hotel, marveling at how old they look, giving each other good-natured grief, and recreating their famous handshake. But already we can see that there’s something edgy and coiled about one of the men, Paul (Lindo). He’s in no mood to make light when his buddies mock him for supporting Donald Trump. Eventually, Paul’s handsome school-teacher son, David (Jonathan Majors), joins the expedition, ostensibly because he wants his cut of the gold bricks, but mostly because he’s worried about his old man.

Lee flashes back to the so-called “Bloods” in the war—and makes a curious choice: The aging actors play themselves as young men—and without the benefit of the kind of de-aging technique that Martin Scorsese employed in The Irishman. It’s hard to know exactly why Lee made this choice—on Twitter, my friend Bill Ryan suggested it was meant to show that they were still mentally in the war, even in their 60s. Someone else posited that Lee simply didn’t have the money for the complicated CGI—I strongly doubt that was the reason. After all, there are multiple ways to negotiate flashbacks—he could’ve simply used a set of younger actors. Whatever the case, after the initial cognitive dissonance wears off, it works—adding a layer of poignancy to the battleground scenes. Of course, in those flashbacks, the troop leader, “Stormin” Norman, is played by a young man, Chadwick Boseman (fun fact: Boseman is actually 42, but he easily looks ten years younger), because he didn’t make it out of ’Nam alive. The effortlessly charismatic Boseman is a perfect bit of casting here—as more than one casting director has noticed, he comes across as a natural leader of men.

There’s another poignant subplot involving Clarke Peters’ Otis, easily the most stable and responsible of the four friends, as he visits Tiên (Lê Y Lan), a prostitute he had a relationship with during the war. She’s financially comfortable now, and living with her adult daughter. She has connections to a shady French merchant (Jean Reno), whom she claims can help the Bloods smuggle the money back to the U.S. But can Otis trust her?

As we’ve come to expect from Lee’s work, Da 5 Bloods pulls out all the stops: shifting visual perspectives and aspect ratios, historical footage, fanciful digressions, references to old films including Apocalypse Now and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The lush soundtrack features the work of the great longtime Lee collaborator Terrance Blanchard as well as era-appropriate music including Marvin Gaye’s mournful acapella version of “What’s Going On.”

Da 5 Bloods is quite literally action packed, but it has two set pieces that stuck out to me. One involves the canoe-ride the Bloods take to the jungle. As they glide down the river, they are solicited by merchants, also on boats. They buy a six pack of beer, say no to the guy peddling flowers. One man, selling live chickens, gets a little pushy—and doesn’t quite realize how agitated Paul is getting. A scuffle breaks out. “You killed my parents!” the merchant ends up screaming at the veterans.

Another scene involves the disarming of a landmine (the Vietnamese jungles are still filled with dangerous landmines that could kill you just for stepping wrong). To tell you more would be to ruin the heart-pounding effectiveness of the scene. (I will say that the introduction of a trio of do-gooder landmine disablers—one is a quasi love interest for David—is another one of the film’s many loosey-goosey digressions that somehow manages to work.)

Both those scenes highlight the brilliance of Delroy Lindo as Paul. The journeyman actor taps into something deep and dark in this character. At 67, Lindo still looks strong and fit, like a guy who could whip someone’s ass in a bar fight. He embodies Paul’s male repression and rage, while never losing sight of his humanity.

Indeed, all the acting is great—this could be the film that makes Jonathan Major, so memorably good in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a movie star—but it’s Lindo’s movie.

It’s remarkable how many genres of movies Lee is able to cram into this film—war film, buddy film, heist film, not to mention father-son reconciliation pic and even a bit of romance—while also addressing topics as weighty as systemic racism and PTSD. I want to emphasize that, while it has serious things on its mind, Da 5 Bloods is tons of fun. It’s over-stuffed, hyper violent, uproariously funny, heartbreakingly sad, filled with messy contradictions—and I wouldn’t change a minute of it.

Da 5 Bloods is now streaming on Netflix.

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children . . .” —Rev. Daniel Berrigan    

When George Mische heard two clergymen were among the four anti-Vietnam War activists who had poured blood on the draft records at the Baltimore Customs House, he immediately knew who was involved. “It was 1 a.m. and I was in bed with my wife—we were newlyweds living with my brother and his family in New York—and the TV was on low in the background,” Mische recalls with a chuckle. “We were making love, and a breaking news report came on describing what happened, and I said to her, ‘That’s got to be Phil.’”

Phil was the Rev. Philip Berrigan, then a 44-year-old local priest at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church. A decorated Battle of the Bulge veteran before entering the seminary, Berrigan had been one of the first Catholic priests to volunteer to join the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and had spoken out against  the Vietnam War since its outset.

Mische—a younger army veteran and peace organizer who had previously worked in Central America during the Kennedy Administration before resigning over later disagreements with U.S. foreign policy—drove to Baltimore the next morning. Mische had become acquainted with Berrigan through his older brother, a prominent lay Catholic social justice leader.

The efforts of Berrigan, artist Tom Lewis, the Rev. James Mengel, and poet David Eberhardt in October 1967—when they were dubbed the Baltimore Four—garnered brief headlines but failed to generate the spark they felt the anti-war movement needed.

An exchange between a federal prosecutor and their defense attorney would help change that.

 Mische was in the courtroom every day for the trial of the Baltimore Four. And even now, at 80, he still vividly recalls the moment when federal prosecutors wheeled the bloody draft cards out to show the jury just how badly they had been damaged. The activists’ defense attorney, trying to mitigate the claims of permanent harm, suggested the draft board could simply use its duplicate draft files to select men into the war effort. No harm, no foul, in other words.

“The prosecutor then revealed there were no duplicate files,” Mische says, still incredulous a half-century later. “The Selective Service doesn’t have back-up records?” Mische recalls the activists’ defense attorney asking in open court. “You mean, if those records had been burned—that’s it?”

Weeks later, Mische, Berrigan and Lewis, both awaiting sentencing for their Baltimore Four action, plus Father Dan Berrigan, Philip’s brother, a Jesuit and noted writer, and five fellow Catholic activists set fire—with homemade napalm no less—to the draft records of nearly 400 potential inductees in Catonsville.

Actor and activist Martin Sheen called the daytime protest behind the Knights of Columbus building on Frederick Road—caught on film by reporters on May 17, 1968—“arguably the single most powerful antiwar act in American history.”

Media savvy in the old-school age of print and television journalism, the Catonsville Nine, as they were soon nicknamed, had tipped off local newspapers and WBAL-TV about the location of an antiwar demonstration without giving away the exact nature of their plans. Quickly, the photos of two charismatic priests in black religious garments, along with other former Catholic clergy and laity, burning a pile of draft records in the quiet, patriotic small town—and then praying and waiting to be arrested—created a national uproar.

In the ensuing four years, more than 40 draft resistance acts inspired by the Catonsville Nine followed—from Washington, New York, Boston, and Chicago to Milwaukee, Camden, Buffalo, and Rochester—reinvigorating the anti-Vietnam War movement.

“We felt like the Vietnam War was this big monster, and somehow we wanted to get our hands around its neck and bring it down,” Mische, one of two surviving members of the Catonsville Nine, says today.

Four of the Nine went underground instead of showing up for prison.

The letters to Congress, the sit-ins and marches, the full-page newspaper ads, the protests in front of the White House and homes of cabinet officials, even the self-immolation of Baltimore Quaker Norman Morrison at The Pentagon—none of it was slowing down the U.S. military campaign in Vietnam in early 1968. Nearly 300,000 young men would be inducted that year, the deadliest of the Vietnam War in terms of American casualties.

The initial plans for the Catonsville raid were made the night of March 31, 1968, shortly after President Lyndon Johnson stunned the country by announcing he would not seek reelection. By then, Mische and his wife, Helene, had moved to Washington, D.C. and were, by coincidence, hosting a cook out that Sunday for friends that included seven of the Catonsville Nine—Lewis and Philip Berrigan, as well as Thomas Melville, a former Maryknoll priest, his wife, Margarita Melville, a former nun, John Hogan, a former Maryknoll brother, and Mary Moylan, a nurse. The Melvilles and Hogan had spent years working with impoverished communities in Guatemala before their religious order kicked them out for supporting leftist guerillas fighting against the U.S.-backed government there. Moylan, who was from Baltimore, had served as a volunteer midwife in Uganda. The Melvilles, Hogan, and Moylan were all living in the Misches’ Dupont Circle rowhouse.

“We were all watching the TV when Johnson said he wasn’t running for reelection, but we knew whether it was Hubert Humphrey [the eventual Democratic nominee] or a Republican president—they were going to continue the war,” says Margarita Melville. “Our concern was how do we stop this slaughter in Vietnam. So we agreed to take action again that night and broaden the scope.”

Daniel Berrigan and David Darst, a Christian Brother and high school teacher from St. Louis, would join the action later.

The location of Catonsville was chosen in large part because the massive parking lot at the Knights of Columbus building would make it safe for burning files. But symbolically, the cozy suburban enclave known for its Fourth of July parade, held since 1947, also proved the perfect setting: The point was to wake up middle-class America, the Catholic Church, and other faith communities—with essentially a religious protest.

Only a handful of the 260 U.S. Catholic bishops stood against the war, and the radical statement the Catonsville Nine delivered to reporters, in turn, delivered a harsh criticism of the faith community. Their message read, in part: “We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.”

That they did not look like protestors made their message all the more resonant.

“That these were clean-cut, mostly 30 and 40 year olds with day jobs helped legitimatize their effort and the anti-war movement,” says Baltimore filmmaker Joe Tropea, who co-directed the 2013 award-winning documentary Hit and Stay about the Catonsville Nine. “The combination of civil disruption with an element of art and theater—and people willing to risk prison for living their values and conscience—that was hugely inspirational to a lot of people.”

But more than even the action itself, it was the five-day trial in a packed Baltimore federal court that cemented the Catonsville action’s legacy as a turning point in the anti-war movement. The trial was preceded by a protest march—1,500 people by some accounts, twice that according to others—from Wyman Park Dell to downtown, which was followed by daily courthouse demonstrations. Counterculture icon William Kunstler took the lead defense attorney role. Radical intellectuals and authors Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn came to Baltimore for the trial.

All of the Nine admitted to burning the draft files, but not to their guilt. Given relatively wide latitude to defend themselves, they testified they acted out of conscience and justified their actions as a response to not only the terrible civilian bloodshed in Vietnam but to U.S. military support for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. They also invoked the presence of poverty and racism at home, which they connected to the cost of an immoral war. The jury, however, took just two hours to return guilty verdicts. But then four of the nine (both Berrigans, Mische, and Mary Moylan) went “underground” instead of showing up for prison. Dan Berrigan, in particular—who made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list—tormented FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by resurfacing and giving sermons, which were reported in the media, and then ducking back below the FBI’s radar. The Berrigans made the cover of Time in 1971, keeping the story alive for years. Ultimately, all involved spent significant time in prison. Philip Berrigan and Lewis received six years because of their earlier involvement in the Baltimore Four—and did about three and a half years with time off for good behavior. Mische served 25 months. Tom and Margarita Melville served 18 months and nine months, respectively.

In the meantime, similar acts were carried out across the U.S. In an indication of the anti-draft movement’s growing acceptance, the Camden (NJ) 28 were acquitted at their trial in the spring of 1973—roughly the same time Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced an end to the draft. By then, more than 58,000 U.S. servicemen had lost their lives. Estimates of Vietnamese military and civilian deaths range from 1.5 million to 3.8 million, not including hundreds of thousands more casualties in Cambodia and Laos.

In many ways, the idea of clergy, and others of deep faith and moral convictions, committing nonviolent felonies in the name of peace and social justice, eluding capture, and going to jail seems anachronistic. But in Baltimore, the Catonsville Nine begat a living legacy.

Philip Berrigan later married former nun Liz McAlister and founded the Jonah House, where they launched the anti-nuclear weapon Plowshares movement. (“Plowshares” refers to the words of the prophet Isaiah, who said that swords shall be beaten into plowshares.)

The most lasting touchstone is the Viva House, a Catholic Worker house in West Baltimore, which was established in August 1968. The first people to stay  there were members of the Nine and their families during the trial. It was founded by Brendan Walsh, a former seminarian, and his wife, Willa Bickham, a former nun, who played behind-the-scene roles supporting the Nine. Since 1968, the Viva House has been a soup kitchen and food pantry.

“The war has kept coming back over the years,” says Walsh. “We served veterans back from Vietnam when we first opened a soup kitchen in Hollins Market, and we see veterans today, from other wars, suffering from PTSD symptoms.

“I was young then, during the war, a conscientious objector. We thought, well, people will see what the war has done to the Vietnamese, to our soldiers, and how it has torn this country apart. They will come to their senses, and we won’t do this again. But the war wasn’t an aberration, it became perpetual,” Walsh continues. “Latin America, Afghanistan, and Iraq—although it’s less visible because we do it with drones. The drug war came, too—a violent solution to a medical problem.

“We’ve watched almost a third of  this city since leave since then—40,000 in our zip code in West Baltimore. Meanwhile things continue to get worse for the poor. That’s the craziest thing. The works of war just destroy everything.”

Blue-Eyed Boy: A Memoir
Robert Timberg (Penguin)

Timberg was less than two weeks away from shipping out of Vietnam when a vehicle he was riding in hit a land mine. The explosion left the Marine with severe burns over much of his body and disfigured his face. This memoir recounts Timberg’s recovery from the physical wounds, as well as the trauma of losing his identity (almost literally), which he describes as a “dawning awareness, delivered in a kind of drip-drip-drip water torture of revelation that gradually lands an equally vicious psychic blow.” Timberg eventually became a journalist and covered events like the Iran-Contra scandal for The Baltimore Sun. Here, he writes unsentimentally about tragedies and triumphs, both personal and political, without ever succumbing to clichéd resolution. As a result, he sometimes comes across as bitter, hard-bitten, or, at the very least, justifiably cranky, which some readers might find off-putting. I found it refreshing and utterly compelling, the work of a clear-eyed man. 

See our Q&A with author Robert Timberg.

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Hotter Than a Match Head
Steve Boone w/ Tony Moss (ECW)

This music memoir grew out of a piece Moss wrote for Baltimore in 2010 about Blue Seas Recording Studios, the floating recording studio that mysteriously sank into the Inner Harbor in 1977. The studio was owned by ex-Lovin’ Spoonful bassist Steve Boone, whose bio seems culled from an early Jimmy Buffett song. With an assist from Moss, Boone recalls the band’s 1960s heyday and fall from grace after a well-publicized drug bust in 1966. Boone dropped out of view, became an avid sailor, and frequented the Caribbean. The period that follows rivals Boone’s rock-star days, as he resurfaces in Baltimore, buys the studio, struggles with various demons, and, when money gets low, sails loads of marijuana up the Chesapeake from the islands. Finally, he gets busted off the coast of Cuba but, ultimately, lands in an unlikely spot—the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

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We Are Not Ourselves
Matthew Thomas (Simon & Schuster)

Thomas writes like a student of Alice McDermott’s—which he is. A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars, where the National Book Award winner has taught since 1996, Thomas uses a McDermott-like template for his debut novel. The story involves an Irish-American family, originally from Queens, and mines extraordinary meaning from ordinary lives, especially the husband-and-wife relationship at the heart of the book. Thomas’s narrative unfolds gracefully, perfectly paced and full of nuance, as Eileen and Ed establish careers (she’s a nurse, he teaches at a community college), have a son, and move to the suburbs. Eileen prods her husband to be more ambitious, and he resists with equal resolve. A calamitous illness forces the couple to reassess all aspects of their lives, making them vulnerable at just about every level. No detail of their relationship seems to escape Thomas, who steers the multi-generational narrative to a conclusion that would likely impress his mentor.  

Robert Timberg was less than two weeks away from shipping out of Vietnam when a vehicle he was riding in hit a land mine. The explosion left the Marine with severe burns over much of his body and disfigured his face. His memoir, Blue-Eyed Boy, recounts Timberg’s recovery from the physical wounds, as well as the trauma of losing his identity. He eventually became a journalist and covered events like the Iran-Contra scandal for The Baltimore Sun. 

Your candid and unflinching appraisal of everything from draft dodging to the dissolution of your marriages is rare. What had you reaching for the delete key? What stopped you?
There’s nothing in the book that I wanted to delete that I didn’t. There were some sections I didn’t want to delete but did because friends whose judgment I trusted recommended I do so. Those sections related mostly to material that they said slowed down the story. So, reluctantly, I cut a short, comical tale of watching the porn classic Deep Throat with the now defunct Maryland Motion Picture Censor Board when I was The Evening Sun’s City Hall reporter. Some people nearly cried when I told them it was on the cutting room floor.

You did not accept the finality of a “permanent disability” and “highly repugnant” wounds. Why not?
To do so would have been to consign myself to a life of bitterness and self-pity. I hated that prospect but it wasn’t until a series of events resulted in my studying journalism at Stanford that I had a sense that life might have more than that in store for me.

And I wanted more. I wanted to matter and for my life to count for something. It was a struggle, but I found those things as a newspaperman. Yes, I was disfigured, but that had to take a back seat to getting whatever story I was chasing. And that made all the difference in the world.

There was also this. I was—and am—a Marine. I also was part of a ragtag, though damn near invincible, football team called the Lynvets that played on the sandlots of Brooklyn and Queens before I headed off to the Naval Academy in 1960. Neither organization has much use for guys who give in to misfortune. Remember that great scene in the movie Chinatown where Jack Nicholson slaps around Faye Dunaway to get her to explain her relationship to a young girl hiding upstairs?

“She’s my daughter.” WHACK! “She’s my sister.” WHACK! “My daughter.” WHACK! “My sister.” WHACK!

In my case, it was like I had both a Marine and a Lynvet taking turns whacking me around as I stood there like a sad sack.

“Say it, Bob!”

“Say what?” WHACK!

“You know.” WHACK!

“What?” WHACK!

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” WHACK!

I finally said it.

“I’m a Marine and a Lynvet!”

In what ways might journalism benefit from having more veterans in the profession?
Let me say first that my regard for the courage and professionalism of today’s war correspondents, both men and women, could not be greater. Would more veterans help? Sure. There would be fewer rhetorical lapses, like calling one soldier the “colleague” of another. And veterans would more easily see through military blather. But I felt more strongly about this issue before I observed the superb work of our current crew of correspondents in the Middle East.

From your days as a Sun reporter and/or recent experience, what’s the most under-appreciated aspect of life in Baltimore?
There is an authenticity about Baltimore that I think is under-appreciated though I think that’s changing. When you’re in Baltimore you know you can’t be anywhere else. Of course there’s the Baltimore accent. And the sports teams, now that they’re winning, contribute to the flavor of the city. So do crabs and oysters and Fells Point. Then there’s the ethnic flavor of East and West Baltimore. Maybe the most underappreciated aspect of Baltimore is recognition of how much William Donald Schaefer did to reshape the city and build its pride in itself.