54 RI Bar J., No. 2, Pg. 21 (September/October 2005). Book Review: Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister by Jerry Elmer, Esq.

• Author: Hon. Stephen J. Fortunato, Jr.

Rhode Island Bar Journal

Volume 54.

54 RI Bar J., No. 2, Pg. 21 (September/October 2005).

Book Review: Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister by Jerry Elmer, Esq

September/October 2005 pg. 21Book Review: Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister by Jerry Elmer, Esq.Hon. Stephen J. Fortunato, Jr.Stephen P. Fortunato is a Rhode Island Superior Court Associate Justice.

Like every capable pinstriped civil litigator, Jerry Elmer is diligent, creative and courtly. But what separates him from his colleagues at the bar - and undoubtedly provides him with solace when shadows of uncertainty hover over his stratagems - are his earlier life experiences as a cat burglar, war resister, and peripatetic adventurer, now recounted in an arresting memoir, Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister.

(By way of disclosure, I represented Jerry more than twenty-five years ago in his successful federal court challenge to municipal officials seeking to prevent him and his associates from displaying on public sidewalks replicas of the "tiger cages" used by this country's surrogates in South Vietnam to confine Vietcong captives. Human rights advocates considered the cages that period's torture chambers du jour; and Jerry wished to graphically portray what the United States was doing to its prisoners ten thousand miles away. For my efforts, I now receive a laudatory paragraph in his book.)

At calendar calls, Jerry Elmer appears no different than any attorney waiting for dispatch to a trial judge - nothing flamboyant, no beads, no sandals, and no peace buttons. Yet his conventional appearance masks the experience of two decades as a peace activist, community organizer, and, of course, criminal dissident. Jerry's saga as peace activist began when he was an earnest and rambunctious high school student in the middle-class community of Great Neck on Long Island, where his liberal, albeit cautious, parents allowed his curiosity to flow toward radical and pacifist literature and mentors. Rapidly, his energy and conscience were ensnared by a web of personal and societal events that pushed him into active resistance against the Vietnam War and sent him on spiritual and physical journeys across this country, to Southeast Asia, and to Providence, Rhode Island. His ramblings ended in 1987 when he entered Harvard Law School.

Elmer's memoir is much more than a personal chronicle of how he came to view the Vietnam War as a political and moral abomination and what he did to oppose it. We are treated to a cultural and historical trip to the core of the anti-war movement and, more important, to the clash of that social force...