Stanley Lawrence Gruca v. Secretary of the Army

TAMM, Circuit Judge:

On this appeal ours is the difficult but limited task of reviewing a draft board’s finding that the appellant Gruca was not entitled to be classified as a conscientious objector. The difficulty we face is inherent in a process which attempts to distinguish between a sincere belief and one that is not truly held and which for its success must rely in large part on deductions drawn from a registrant’s words and demeanor. At the same time the range of our intervention in this process is narrowly limited to determining whether there was any basis in fact for the draft board’s…