John Kent was a two-time all-American wrestler from the Naval Academy. He wanted to be an astronaut and became a jet pilot. But events kept pulling him in another direction. There was that blind date at Annapolis who argued with him all night about the Vietnam War. He thought it was a just war, but he came out on the short end of every argument. And there was that Marine major, an A-4 pilot, bragging to John’s training class of eager pilots about the old Vietnamese man on a bicycle he had incinerated with a heat-seeking missile — just for fun!

In the summer of 1967, as a midshipman, John was serving on a ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. He didn’t learn much about the war, but he learned something else when his ship docked at the Subic Bay Naval Base. This was the largest American Navy installation in the Pacific, adjacent to the Philippine town of Olongapo. It was one of the most celebrated R&R destinations for military personnel in Vietnam, a so called fantasyland for adults. What he found instead was a nightmare of degradation, all in service to and fostered by the American military. You could throw coins into the sewage-filled river and see kids and desperate Filipino adults dive into the fetid water. And that was only the beginning. No thank you.

On his way to Miramar, Calif., for F-8 training en route to Vietnam for the second time, John went home on leave. It was November 1969 and one of the biggest antiwar demonstrations was gathering in Washington, D.C., near where he lived. His siblings were going, and he and his dad decided to follow. The power of hundreds of thousands of antiwar voices was immense, and the songs brought both of them to tears. Pete Seeger led the huge crowd in singing, over and over, John Lennon’s line, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.” Between choruses Seeger would sing phrases like, “Are you listening, Nixon?” “Are you listening, Pentagon?”

John was listening, and before they left the Mall he turned to his dad and said, “I don’t think I can go back to Vietnam.” He didn’t, and within a few months, along with other naval officers, he founded the San Diego chapter of the Concerned Officers Movement.

Jim Skelly grew up in an Irish working-class family within a strict Catholic tradition, which he rebelled against, leaving him with a hatred of arbitrary authority. He got into the University of Minnesota on an R.O.T.C. scholarship. By the time he graduated in 1967, he was already ambivalent about the growing war. He volunteered to work on an oil tanker with the Atlantic Fleet, even though he was increasingly disturbed by what he was reading and hearing about the war. Shortly after learning of Robert Kennedy’s murder in June 1968, he wrote a letter saying he was opposed to the war and asking for a better way to serve his country. He never sent it.

In January 1970 Jim received orders to become part of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam in Saigon. He knew that if he went to Vietnam he might well come back a human wreck, drunk and dead at 40. Not sure what to do, he went to his predeployment training in San Diego and began searching. He found some literature from the Movement for a Democratic Military, an antiwar group, in a local head shop.

When he showed up at the M.D.M. office, he met a San Diego police officer named John Paul Murray, then disguised as Jay King, an antiwar activist. They talked for a while and then “Jay King,” playing his antiwar role, said, “You sound like a conscientious objector.” Jim said, “Oh, O.K.,” and within a few months had filed his application for C.O. and found the other men in the Concerned Officers Movement. He was the first of several of us to file a federal lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird seeking to be released from active duty as conscientious objectors.