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In Limbo and Looking for a New Life : Former <i> Cause Celebre</i> Ben Sasway Turning His Energy Inward

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As he makes another pot of coffee and stirs embers in the fireplace, Ben Sasway watches a thick mist creep over Palomar Mountain. A serious storm is moving in. No chance he’ll be able to work on restoring his family’s cabin in the middle of a freezing rain.

Maybe he’ll try reading “Moby Dick” again. But, after 10 pages, Sasway found Herman Melville’s classic to be “incredibly self-indulgent.” He could “veg-out” in front of the television for a while. But he’s been doing that a lot lately. He can’t play backgammon, because no one else is around on this mountaintop where he has taken refuge the past few months. In the old days, a hundred supporters could have kept him company. But he’s looking for something different.

“Welcome to limbo,” he says wryly.

For an instant, he seems to be talking about the rainy day. But it’s more than that. He’s talking about his life.

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Three and a half years ago, Benjamin Sasway, the first American since the Vietnam War to be indicted and imprisoned for failing to register for the draft, walked out of the U. S. Penitentiary at Lompoc, near Santa Barbara, and “went screaming off into the night.” He wanted no more of press conferences, court appearances or prison sentences. He had taken a stand and paid the price: six months in jail for refusing to register for the draft.

But there is no way of recovering the years, or of knowing how his life might have turned out had he not taken a stand that began in January, 1980, when President Jimmy Carter, reacting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, proposed reinstituting the military draft for 19- and 20-year-olds.

Recalls News of the Draft

“I was standing in another guy’s dorm room at Humboldt State when I heard about it,” Sasway said. “From that moment, I knew it was something I would never do. I think I made a quip like ‘Screw it, I’m not going to do it.’ And the guy said, ‘Hey, you can go to jail for that.’ ”

Sasway told his parents, who live in Vista, that he was not going to register, and said they tried hard to talk him out of his revolt. When they realized his mind was made up, he said they became supportive, and, instead of registering before the July 24, 1980, cutoff date, the 19-year-old college freshman sat down and wrote a four-page letter to the President.

In it, Sasway said that “the spirit of this mandate, like actual conscription, is immoral and incompatible with a truly free society. . . . I feel compelled by my conscience to state honestly and openly that I am not registering for the draft.”

During the next five years, Sasway got the 15 minutes of celebrity status that Andy Warhol promised everyone--and a lot more. During the summer of 1982, his boyish face accompanied stories in magazines and newspapers across the country. His public comments about the registration were relayed to the nation in 20-second sound bites on the network news. He found himself being praised and excoriated, but not ignored.

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‘Will Not Be a Tool’

“I will not be a tool of the American military misdirection that involved us in Vietnam 15 years ago and that might see our involvement in El Salvador or Nicaragua today,” Sasway told reporters on June 29, 1982, when the U. S. attorney’s office informed him of his pending indictment. He faced a maximum of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

“I don’t especially want to be a martyr,” he said. “But I also feel the obligation to perform the dictates of my conscience. If that means going to jail or suffering ill consequences, I have to do that.”

Jail is what it meant. In August, 1982, after a three-day trial, Sasway was convicted of the felony of not registering for the draft and sentenced to 30 months in prison. There were three years of appeals--Sasway’s attorney, Charles T. Bumer, said Sasway was being selectively prosecuted since about 650,000 others had failed to register--but neither the U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals nor the U. S. Supreme Court would hear the case.

Off to Prison in 1985

In April, 1985, Sasway kissed his girlfriend and his parents goodby, put his furniture in storage and checked into the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego for his processing to Lompoc.

Up to that moment, Sasway had been caught up in his cause and in the attention that it brought. A few nights before he went to jail, his college friends threw him a going-away party, at which they made a macabre prison joke by presenting him with a bar of soap attached to a rope. Despite the attempts to keep the evening light, Sasway managed one last speech as a free man.

“I have cause to celebrate because I have lived my life in accordance with my conscience,” he told his friends dramatically. “I have not allowed external forces to crush who I am.”

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Sasway’s notoriety followed him into Lompoc, where his decision to go to jail as an act of conscience was regarded by some fellow inmates as a form of lunacy. In prison, he said, he worked as a secretary in the business office and a as clerk in the prison commissary, and pitched hay on the cattle farm.

When he got out in 1985, having served six months of his 30-month sentence, Sasway returned to Humboldt State, where he had been majoring in philosophy, political science and journalism. For three years, he took classes at Humboldt and worked construction jobs in the Northern California coastal community of Arcata. Then he decided to come home and start over.

“I didn’t see anything happening for me up there,” he said. “How’s that for a hip and groovy way of putting it?”

Sasway said he moved in October to his parents’ cabin on Palomar Mountain, thinking it would be a good way to begin easing back into life.

“My big goal for the next two months is to open up a bank account,” he said. “And it would be nice if I could enter my ‘working stiff’ phase of life with some degree of deliberateness, because it really is a central part of who I am.”

Time Has Taken Its Toll

This is not the 21-year-old who asked, “What could be a more important ethical decision than to decide to kill or not to kill?”

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The face that plastered the front pages seven years ago has become sharply angular. He’s thinner. He favors jeans and T-shirts over the shirt and tie he wore during his trial. His hair, once short and parted neatly down the middle, is cropped like a rock star’s, spiky on top, shoulder-length and curly in back.

Sasway still wears his liberal heart on his sleeve, arguing as adamantly as ever for peace, a clean environment and human rights. But his words are punctuated with a sarcasm that was not there seven years ago. He swears more often. There is a hint of bitterness, of abandonment. The friends and political supporters who rallied around him in 1980 are somewhere else in 1989, and media darlings have come and gone.

After he was released from prison, Sasway shunned the limelight he once enjoyed. Before his trial, he appeared on every talk show, from “Phil Donahue” to “Today.” He held press conferences to announce each new development in his case. He accepted every interview request.

“I liked it all the way through because people were listening to me. When a person’s mouth moves as much as mine does, it’s easy to get the impression that people are bored. All of a sudden, people were interested for 15 minutes. It’s exciting that I was involved with a whole bunch of people coming together on this particular issue, yelling and screaming and demanding that their world make sense. It was exciting having people appreciate me. But, at the same time, every step of the way it was profoundly destabilizing.”

During the past three years he’s avoided interviews, appearing only once on a radio talk show about five months after leaving Lompoc.

“It wasn’t really very becoming because I was incredibly glib,” he said. “I had gotten really tired of being so idealistic and so serious, and talking so much. It was all so banal. So banal.”

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The energy Sasway once used to fight the outside world has been turned inward.

“I don’t mean to be vain, but I was a pretty big story for a while. I was prepared to deal with jail, I was prepared to make my big stand. But over a period of time I started to get the feeling everybody was judging me. . . . I started to lose track of where I was in all of it. And that’s something you just can’t prepare for . . . . “

As he looks back now, from the vantage point of being 28 years old, Sasway questions whether his convictions or his character were involved in his decision to speak out against the draft.

“Maybe it was just stubbornness--19-year-olds are stubborn, 19-year-olds are idealistic, 19-year-olds think they wrote the book on truth. They may not be virtuous. They may just be stubborn.”

Jail is over. College has gone on too long. It’s time to get on with it. He needs to get off the mountain. But that’s something Sasway said he has never been good at, chastising himself for having no self-discipline.

“A lot of people get a lot more done than I do. They’re a lot more productive than I am. So I’m not convinced I’m doing myself or anybody any good this way, philosophizing all the time,” he said. “They’re out there doing stuff while I’m flapping my lips.”

Sasway’s girlfriend of eight years, Laurel Linstedt, works at a children’s camp near the San Francisco Bay Area. They’ve got a lot of history. She stood by him through his indictment, his trial, his prison stint, his return to the real world. But Sasway hasn’t decided what to do about this part of his life, either. They separated nine months ago, but he says it’s not over.

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Sasway admires his father, Joe, for taking a practical approach to life. Although Sasway said he has spent his 20s entertaining “life’s big questions,” his father, during the same period of his own life, got a job as a teacher and began raising a family, even though he wasn’t sure it was what he wanted to do.

“My father was the last generation that looked at work as drudgery that you just did,” Sasway said. And, although his father accepts that Sasway and his peers entertain the big questions, he tells his son “you’re going to be a tough bunch to make happy.”

Knowing that, has Sasway decided what he wants to do with his life?

The answer comes wrapped in flippancy. The wall of the cabin needs insulating, he said. He’s looking for compelling, engaging work in the area. Probably temporary, but incredibly lucrative. Really, he doesn’t have any serious plans. If he can’t adjust to life in San Diego, he might move to Tennessee. He doesn’t say why.

He plans to stay on Palomar Mountain through February, but that’s as far as his plans go. Welcome to limbo.

On the wall of the family cabin, there’s an old photo from Ben’s crusading days. It’s a simple black-and-white picture of a pile of signs left by supporters following a rally after his trial.

“Free Ben,” the signs say.

“I went through my rebellious, idealistic, rowdy phase, and now I’m interested in settling down and having a fairly quiet life,” he said. Then, reaching back for a little of the fire of 1982, he goes on. “Continuing to make a difference, continuing to hold strong values, but focusing on domestic issues, like earning a living, tiling a kitchen, that type of thing.

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“Maybe the reason I take refuge in that theory is that tiling the kitchen and earning a living are good and appropriate as long as they are done in love. You don’t always need to be on the radical edge of social movement to make a difference.”

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