In February of 1942, just after America was thrust into the war, Morris was being escorted off a transcontinental train that had taken four days to transport him from Los Angeles to Magnolia, Arkansas. He had one bag with him and was wearing a tweed jacket and khakis. But the only item he owned worth any amount of money was the gold band on his wedding finger.

It was devastatingly hot, the humidity making it difficult to breathe—sweat making the skin itchy. Two military police were waiting. They looked at him as if he was a convicted kiddie-raper when they approached and asked, “Morris G. Adams?” And when he nodded they looked at him with surprise. “Didn’t expect you to show. The last two who said they were coming at their own will are probably down in Mexico tanning by now. This way.” One walked in front of Morris and the other behind as they led him to a jeep parked just outside the station entrance. Morris sat in front with the driver.

The two officers did not speak for the first twenty-minutes of the drive to the camp for conscientious objectors. Several hundred young men would be there to show their civil and peaceful opposition to the war. Nobody knew how long they would be interned. The word was that they would be there as long as the war lasted. Some said that would be when the waters parted and swallowed Japan whole.

“Never expected a Hebe to be here,” the driver said. Morris didn’t respond, just continued to stare at the passing fields on his side of the jeep. “I’m from New York myself. My mother says every sheenie in Queens joined up to kill Hitler.” Silence. “Not much of a talker, are ya?”

Morris felt he should have been thinking about his smartly dressed wife he had left back in California. Helen said she respected his choice to not fight. But he was thinking about his youngest brother, Simon, who had stopped speaking to him when Morris announced that he would not serve his draft notice. He wondered where Simon was right now. He had predicted that it would be his father who would react like that. But Henry Gandelman had just sighed and said, “Do what you do; I can’t stop ya.” This was after Henry told him Benny had been rejected by each branch of the military; failing his physical exam every time with his bum shoulder, not to mention his flat feet. “They never let me fight,” Benny would lament bitterly the rest of his life.

Morris was told that at the camp he and other pacifists would be given jobs that would contribute significantly to the war effort. Morris was confident that he would be the only one who had ever killed a man, something he would keep from others. He had not spoken to his oldest brother Joe before leaving for Arkansas, but he knew Joe was not going to the war. Joe was married with two kids and working at Southern California Power and Water. He and Morris’ father were hoping to open a general store beyond the Burbank citrus groves, considered switching to work at the aviation plants in Santa Monica to help them build a nest egg.

The dust was as unbearable as the humidity. His clothes were almost immediately discarded for the government-issued chinos and tee-shirts each “conchie”—as the objectors were referred to—were required to wear. Morris’ hair was quickly trimmed to keep the camp from developing a lice epidemic and he found himself wiping his eyeglasses constantly until his handkerchief was as brown as the ground.

The men were quartered in hastily built barracks; ten to a house with five in each of the bunkrooms. The camp itself was a series of cardboard-like buildings—a mess hall, a workshop, assembly building—rickety telephone poles appearing to have been shoved into the ground like dangling toothpicks. The conchies were only allowed to place calls on Christmas Eve.

That first night Morris sat in what would be his home for the next three years and wrote out a series of letters at the table that would be used for everything from card games to repairing ax handles. He had expected there to be a great deal of talk amongst the other conchies. There wasn’t. That night three of his barrack mates cried as Morris wrote his letters solemnly. The first was to Helen that ended with, “I know you will wait for me, and I shall wait for you. Eternally yours, Mori.” The second, to his surprise, was much longer, and seemed to come from his pen with far more need and immediacy. It was to his youngest brother. Simon never wrote back to any of Morris’ letters. In fact, Morris had no idea if Simon even received them. Helen did respond, frequently at first, then less. In the spring of 1944 he had not received a letter from her in three months. Then one arrived. It was not long.

Morris,

I hope you are well. I want you to know that I have been seeing somebody. He was on the football team at my high school and we recently reconnected. It’s not serious. I just thought you should know.

Take care, Helen.

It was the first time she had not signed “Love” before her name.

Most at the CO camp kept to themselves. Morris sensed that the conchies blamed the Jews for dragging America into the war. Many were from peace churches. There were Amish boys who wouldn’t listen to the radio. There were Quakers and Mennonites that held prayer sessions several times each day. There were a few college-educated intellectuals that Morris listened to during the nightly sits by the mess hall stove before retiring at curfew. The most prominent conversation topic was always of protesting the menial duties they were assigned, although this never occurred. The food stank.

At first the conchies were set to work jarring rations, then stitching service uniforms until the government established factories in Michigan and Ohio to boost the economy. After a while, Morris noticed that they were being sent out daily like a chain gang with MP guards watching over them while they dug ditches with shovels and pickaxes. They were treated as a national liability, seen as cowards that needed to be tucked away where the public would never know of them.

In the camp, Morris could not help feel that history was passing him by. It seemed that Captain America and Superman knew more about the war in Marvel and DC comics than news he was privy to. Churches that supported the conchies provided each man with two dollars and fifty cents each month, which Morris spent on paper and pencils to write his letters. After a while, he felt he was doing time for a crime he had not committed. When he was free to leave the camp two weeks following the dropping of the second atomic bomb, he went straight back to California. After three years, Morris had reevaluated what it would take for him to become the man he wished to be. He had to be a man with a secret. He told himself that when he bought his first home he would have a flagpole to hang the stars and stripes each day. But he had his trump card; a wife who would sit pleasantly at dinner parties while he lied. He would erase his own history. But some things one can’t completely eradicate.

It was over between Helen and the man she was seeing by the time Morris returned to Los Angeles, where she was working as a receptionist for a rope supply company in Inglewood. But “over” means different things to different people. She saw the man a few times again after Morris returned. “Just to be sure,” she had said. After three years apart, being with Helen was like getting to know a complete stranger.

Simon always liked to play a game called “Where Were You When?” It was his own way of making an uncomfortable situation relaxed. When Morris finally saw his youngest brother again after the war and there was nothing for them to talk about, they started the game.

“Where were you when Pearl Harbor was bombed?” Simon had asked.

“I was taking a deposition in Long Beach,” Morris had said. “Where were you?”

Simon had smiled for the first time since speaking to Morris again. “I was at the movies. I’m going back to Sunrise to write pictures again. I’m never leaving the pictures again. Never. What are you gonna do, same as before?”