On May 17, 1968, nine Catholics led by the priest brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan removed 378 draft files from the board office in Catonsville, Maryland and burned them in the parking lot with homemade napalm, praying as they waited for arrest. "Our apologies, good friends," Daniel wrote, "for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children." The trial that followed — dramatized in Daniel's play "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine" — and sentences of two to three and a half years launched the "ultra-resistance": dozens of raids by the Milwaukee Fourteen, the DC Nine, and others that destroyed tens of thousands of draft records.

Daniel Berrigan went underground rather than report to prison, appearing at rallies while the FBI hunted him for four months until his capture on Block Island in August 1970 — the first priest on the Bureau's most-wanted list. The campaign culminated in acquittal: the Camden 28, whose 1971 raid had been enabled by an FBI informant, were found not guilty across the board in 1973, a jury nullification verdict Supreme Court Justice William Brennan later called a great moment in the history of trial by jury.