“Joan of Arc was a conscientious objector.” A search for that sentence on Google comes up completely empty.
Has no one ever written that sentence? Apparently not. But I will.
In the technical sense, Jehanne Darc/Jeanne d’Arc spent her life objecting, much of it with weapons of war at hand. She was also obsessed with conscience, a century before Martin Luther famously declared, “To go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” She clung to the fast-receding concept of chivalry, even as she helped obliterate its protections by using ammunition against the English. Even after she was captured and put on trial for witchcraft, she threw her captors’ vaunted principles against them, over and over.
All of this has little to do with conscientious objection as I’ve always understood it, and like the military CO I supported back when I was on staff at Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. By then, courts had recognized that some servicemembers’ experiences leads them to change their beliefs about being part of the military machine; it was part of my job to help each one manage the complex and arduous process needed for a CO discharge (e.g. Army Regulation 600-43). In retrospect, it was my first job teaching writing, as I helped them identify their '“point of crystallization” that made them realize they were a CO. In the process, I learned that those calling the G.I Rights Hotline were not that much different than I was; we both wanted to be part of something bigger than ourselves, except in their case, what they’d joined was the U.S. military. I learned a lot from working with them, and from the Vietnam veterans who volunteered to help with the calls.
All of which led to my first book, and my current activism with similar groups as we try to contend with a changing world. It also makes for a strange list of current writing projects. While I work to shape last fall’s talk at the Peace History conference for the journal Peace and Change, I keep touching base with Jehanne Darc, as I start writing the second book of my Joan trilogy.
Writing that down makes me think I should put off the Joan writing and concentrate on the article. But these are my process notes, where I share what’s crowding my brain.
(Public-domain image of super-cluttered desk)
The Gonzo Historian Checks In. With no Ph.D. or history department backing, I never knew what an ORCID number was, or that I’d ever need one. Now, looking at Peace and Change, I’m realizing that my October talk needs to become an article with an argument about military dissenters and why they need to be included in peace history.
When I shared a draft with my writing group, they said my experience on the Hotline was an important way in—and that I needed to connect with current wars. That automatically made me think of my Aaron Bushnell piece, of course, of conscientious objector Levi Pierpont whose story shapes that piece, and about Larry Hebert, an airman like Pierpont and Bushnell, who went on hunger strike just after Easter and stood in front of the White House wearing a VETERANS AGAINST GENOCIDE T-shirt. as
Hebert’s hunger strike has historical overtones of its own. The link above is to an article written by Vietnam veteran Gerry Condon, who knew well those who did the same in 1986, to protest U.S. policy in El Salvador. A chunk of my book:
Among the 10 veterans on the trip was Charlie Liteky, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1968. The trip to Nicaragua broke him, Liteky wrote. “Women seated in a semicircle—white-shawled and black-dressed, young and old—were holding photographs of mutilated male bodies, given to them by the military as visual aids to help them identify their mysteriously missing sons and husbands. Those horror stories ... finally crashed through the emotional defenses I had built around my psyche.” [i] Willson was also devastated. “[When] I witnessed the caravan of open caskets on horse-drawn wagons carrying eleven dead civilians from those attacks, mostly women and children. I mumbled under my breath, ‘I have been here before. My money is still murdering people in my name for a big lie.’”
In 1986, as Congress was approving $93 million in military aid to Central America, Willson went to Washington, D.C. with two members of his delegation: former Artillery Sergeant George Mizo, who in the Tet Offensive had been the sole survivor of an assault that killed the rest of his platoon, and Liteky, who on July 30 stood at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and became the first veteran ever to return the Medal of Honor. “I find it ironic,” Liteky told reporters, “that conscience calls me to renounce the medal for the same basic reason that I received it—trying to save lives.”[ii]
That September, all three announced that they were holding a fast in front of the White House: they would refuse all food and live on water until they’d not only changed Congress’ mind but saw a national anti-war “spiritual awakening.”[iii] Supporters began flooding Capitol Hill and the Mall, with a Congressional resolution of respect and sympathy fasts from the likes of Dick Gregory a Martin Luther King III. George Mizo told the press, “Those of us who have seen firsthand that horror called war know how fragile life is, and how precious life is, and know that war is not the answer but part of the problem.”
After 35 days, as Mizo and Liteky’s health wavered, John Kerry, who’d visited both men frequently, issued a public statement beseeching them to “end the hunger strike before you die.” They held out until October 17. Veterans Fast Against War, Nation Shrugs, sighed The Los Angeles Times.
I’m hoping that Hebert knows about this, and takes heart from the fact that U. S. policy toward Central America did shift just a little as a result. Hebert has just had his leave revoked by his command: a sign that he’s having an effect on the dialogue. (I learned this from the Center on Conscience and War, which is still doing the work with COs that I used to do.) And I think the whole essay could use these connections to current trends, given the flashbacks is currently giving Vietnam and post-9/11 veterans. It could really start with Hebert/Bushnell/Pierpont.
Maybe I’ll work on that revision on weekdays and use weekends for my other project, about the conscientious objector who highlighted war’s damage and led her own war,
The unspoken link between these two projects: I spent much of tahe end of my time at CCCO advocating for and with survivors of military sexual trauma — long before it had that name, before the Emmy-winning documentary and historic changes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, changes that took jurisdiction in such cases away from the commands that had often ignored them. In 1996, when brave recruits at Aberdeen Proving Ground spoke out about rape by drill sergeants, I published an op-ed citing a 1995 Minnesota study in which 90 percent of women vets reported they’d suffered harassment, one-third of whom reported being raped. In a TV appearance about the issue, I gave out the GI Rights Hotline number and spent the following weeks talking to survivors of assault from numerous wars. After I found myself walking into traffic, my therapist told me “I would never do so many intakes all at once;” but it felt like I had no choice.
Some survivors who contacted me eventually organized the short-lived STAMP: Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel. When I left California to concentrate on my writing, I was originally going to take STAMP with me, in order to facilitate the group’s growth into a stable nonprofit. That never happened, but those survivor’s voices never entirely left me.
As a freelance journalist, I wrote about military domestic violence and about the group that fulfilled STAMP’s role, Service Women’s Action Center, which strayed from its anti-war roots and worked closely in Washington to achieve those UCMJ reforms. As a novelist, I absorbed what I’d learned about war into what I was writing, and when the great Frederic Tuten asked my class in the CCNY MFA program to write a ghost story, I wrote a piece that began: “By the time the fourth soldier pulls her legs open, she can't feel anything below her throat.” That’s the first sentence I wrote in what became my masters’ thesis, a magical-realist reimagining of the story of Joan of Arc that begins with a 12-year old girl’s rape. It won the Geraldine Griffin Moore Award at CCNY; three+ decades later, that text is now scheduled for 2025 publication as jehanne darc, Book One.
Book One, because it ends with her most famous victory, at Orleans, but there is so much more to her story. Whole movies have focused on her 1430 trial for witchcraft, sealed by her insistence on male clothing; the gender aspects of that alone have engendered (ha!) multiple dissertations. That will be Book Three, which ends with her mother, Isabelle, lobbying successfully for a rehabilitation trial in 1452. That trial is why we have so much first-person testimony from many of her allies, the better for me to quote from. I don’t think I need to write that second trial, but talk to me in a decade or so.
Meanwhile, as I put Book One through edits for Mumblers Press, I have tons of decisions to make and Book Two to write! The latter will start with the push to Reims, contain both Charles’ coronation and Jehanne’s s capture, and detail lots of battles in between. Lots of arcs:
I’ve already initiated the war-crimes thread, using the usefully twisted fact that her army included the infamous Gilles de Rais but including her brother Pierre in those crimes, but when does Jehanne become aware of them? Does it influence her decisions to push for the use of ammunition, which she’s on record for popularizing?
SHE SAID HER VOICES STOPPED AFTER REIMS. That’s what she told her inquisitors, blaming Charles et al. for the assault on Paris. The coronation is thus a turning point for what I call her “braided voice,” the whispers of victim/survivors throughout history. In my story it can’t stop, but maybe stops helping her win? For my Jehanne the braided voice changes after hundreds die in her/their wars, she claims the wars for herself – thus feels it more? One of my taglines for her enemies is “The clanking of armor and screaming of steel.” Now it’s the screaming of her steel. The clanking of her armor. Her war crimes, too.
When does she decide to die? She says early that she’ll only last a year: does she engineer her own capture? When her moral injury finally explodes: her sense of the damage done by her wars. Come up with a code phrase for it, maybe the swallowed sword? Jumping off the tower is about that, but also track her sides’ war crimes, and not just de Rais’.
A question for Book 3: Does my Jehanne become a conscientious objector, refusing to abjure herself?
Book Two is mostly about Jehanne the military leader, as Kelly De Vries calls her in this book. In narrating this phase I’m guided both by De Vries and by The Queen and the Maid , a book about her most famous sponsor, the dauphin’s mother-in-law Yolande of Aragon. The latter couldn’t be at Charles VII’s coronation because her daughter was about to give, but'“amazingly reports of the day that were sent to Yolande and Marie still survive. In one, the author writes, ‘May it please you to know that yesterday the King arrived in this town of Reims where he found complete and full obedience. Today he was anointed and crowned and the beautiful mystery was striking to behold because it was as solemn and compromised of all the accoutrements that are essential to such a ceremony, as if it had been in full preparation for a year’.” There’s a whole Yolande arc throughout the trilogy, including in her home at Saumur Castle, hundreds of miles from Orleans. That home contained the library of Charles d’Orleans, rescued after he was captured at the 1415 Battle of Azincort (Agincourt).
I need to narrate the battles both pre-Reims (the first she leads beside Alencon) and post-Reims, including Paris. The latter comes with higher casualties. Behind her back the Duke of Burgundy is dancing his fake ceasefire, while his troops capture her at Compiegne. I already have scenes featuring the king’s counselor La Tremoille, whose maneuvering for peace was sincere and greasy at the same time.
One more Book III note: Yolande died in 1442, ten years before the rehabilitation trial, The latter was sparked by Isabelle Darc, who wrote to Pope Callixtus: “I had a daughter born in lawful wedlock, whom I had furnished worthily with the sacraments of baptism and confirmation and had reared in the fear of God and respect for the tradition of the Church ... yet although she never did think, conceive, or do anything whatever which set her out of the path of the faith ... certain enemies ... had her arraigned in religious trial ... in a trial perfidious, violent, iniquitous, and without shadow of right ... did they condemn her in a fashion damnable and criminal, and put her to death very cruelly by fire ... for the damnation of their souls and in notorious, infamous, and irreparable damage done to me, Isabelle, and mine.” I need to plot an arc for Isabelle too. That includes for Book Two; she’s at the coronation, but I need to know her perspective on the battles that include two of her kids. She was at least 35 when the war was going on, so around my age when she was campaigning for a new trial for her girl. My friend Lizzie Stark is writing a book about the power of crones; I need to nominate both Yolande and Isabelle as Crones in History.
I don’t imagine that either Isabelle or Yolande talked to Jehanne about conscience, or conceived that the war surrounding them could be resisted without more war. Of course, there’s so much I don’t know about either of them—whether the two of them ever met, what either of them thought about the Maid’s gender-transgressive personal style. So many conversations to create from whole cloth, hoping to weave something strong enough for her story.
But first, time to write that Peace and Change article. And who knows, maybe I’ll ask the peace-history crowd whether they ever thought of Joan of Arc as a conscientious objector.