Like millions of others, I watched the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick
documentary on the Vietnam War. It was a visceral, frequently gut-wrenching,
tearful experience made personal by my having progressed from a teenager to a
thirty-something adult during the tumultuous years of the late 1950s through 1975.
During at least four of those years, I worried off and on about being drafted into
the U.S. military and being pulled kicking and screaming into the great maw of
the war machine.
Today, it is all but impossible for people born after the 1960s
to comprehend the diametrically opposed emotions generated by the Vietnam War that
tore the fabric of America apart so terribly it has never been stitched back
together. In this short personal reflection, I’ll try to relate one young man’s
feelings about that conflict as they changed over time and under the influence
of increasing information as well as increasing exposure to the draft.
As might be guessed, my personal understanding of the Vietnam
War evolved a great deal with passing time as I gradually become aware of the
many facets of that War. As a young Catholic high school-aged teenager and
postulant preparing to become a member of the Society of Mary, it is safe to
say that I started out as a gung-ho but unthinking supporter of all things Jack
Kennedy, including his anti-Communist militarism and the now justly infamous ‘Domino
Theory’ that was applied to French Indochina and neighboring South Asian
countries. And with all the furor over the battle for applying the rights
granted to all citizens by the Constitution to black Americans, it wasn’t until
just before graduating from Saint Louis University in the summer of 1966 that
the Vietnam War became personal to me.
Prior to that time, I had plowed through two years of
college draft deferments without even a first, much less a second, thought
about what the end of that deferment actually would mean to me personally.
Suddenly, in the summer of 1964, the start of my junior year at Saint Louis University,
it hit me. My II-S student deferment had lapsed. As a result, my skinny ass was
hanging out there naked with an official draft status of I-A, meaning I was
draft eligible.
Lucky for me, the Vietnam War was still simmering and was
nowhere close to boiling over. Plus, my draft board apparently had a surplus of
young men, age 18 to 21, who had no deferments and would eventually receive
letters of invitation from the Board to get a medical exam prior to induction
into the Army. So, like the stupid kid I was, I simply put the possibility of
being drafted out of my mind and enrolled for courses like absolutely nothing
adverse could happen to me. Though a couple short years later I did discover,
to my chagrin, that by 1965 the Selective Service System was inducting an
average of about 300,000 young men annually, nearly all of whom wound up in
Vietnam.
My initial introduction to Vietnam and what was then called
French Indochina was through two spell-binding novels, Graham Greene’s 1955
psychological thriller, The Quiet
American, and one that was not nearly so good, The Ugly American, by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, published
in 1958. But it was the Kennedy-Nixon debates that dragged me into the
political quagmire that was Vietnam. As a side note, the first three debates I
only read about in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch since my TV watching ability was strictly limited since I was
boarding at Maryhurst Prep and we were prohibited from watching almost all TV
shows. The last debate, broadcast on October 21, 1960, was the only one the
entire student body of Maryhurst was allowed to watch live.
In the summer of 1966, only three months short of my wedding
date, somehow I became convinced that since I was moving from my parent’s house
in north St. Louis to an apartment in the southern part of the City I had to
change draft boards. So, one summer morning in mid-May 1966 I called the draft
board and told whoever answered the phone that I wanted to change boards. I was
told I had to come in and talk to a clerk. My appointment was for the following
Tuesday at 10:00 AM at the Federal Building downtown. Great.
That next Tuesday I put on freshly pressed dress shirt and
pants, tie, the only decent sport coat I owned, a pair of spit-polished black
shoes and off to the U.S. Federal Building I went. When I told a young woman at
the information desk I had a 10:00 appointment with a clerk she directed me
down the hall to Room whatever. When I arrived I took careful note of the title
on the door: Clerk of the Board. Mercy. I wasn’t seeing any old clerk but what
turned out to be the Executive Director whose actual title was Clerk of the
Draft Board.
I knocked and entered a room as big as a small hockey rink.
The proto-typical little old white woman was seated behind an enormous desk at
the far end of the room. I walked across the room, introduced myself, and shook
her hand. She told me to sit and asked the reason for my visit. I told her
blah, blah, blah.
She hesitated a moment and then asked what I was doing with
my life. I gave her the short version. I was graduating from SLU in less than a
month or so, getting married July, and starting graduate school in the fall. My
real goal was to get master’s and doctorate degrees and become a university
professor.
She listened patiently and then in a voice devoid of
expression told me that if I changed draft boards I would be drafted within two
days. Because the board into which I wanted to move had NO young men of draft
eligible age without deferments. Holy shit. I nearly had a stroke. Another body
to be shoved into the Army’s Vietnam meat grinder.
Then she asked if I wanted her advice. Of course, I said,
after pulling my tongue out of my throat and making sure my heart was still
beating. She told me I should write a letter informing her of my pending
marriage and a temporary change in domicile. I should keep my parents’ address
as my permanent residence because, as she said rather grimly, that year alone
my draft board had more than a thousand draft eligible young men with nothing
better to do with their lives than serve their country. If and when anything
changed my status all I had to do was send her another letter detailing those
specifics. And she would keep my documents at the back of the draft eligible
file. If Congress declared war, she said, you’ll probably be drafted. But,
failing an official Act of Congress declaring war, I should be able to pursue
my graduate studies. I nearly jumped across the desk and kissed her.
That started my letter writing program with the Clerk, whose
name may have been Hazel T_____, though due to the fog of time I’m not 100
percent certain. I sent her a wedding announcement. A letter documenting my
move to a “temporary” address in south St. Louis with my new wife. A birth
announcement two years later when our son, David, was born. A copy of my
acceptance letter to the doctoral program at the University of Florida. And
finally, my new “temporary” address in married student housing in Gainesville.
Not long after arriving at the U of F and starting classes I
got into a heated argument with a fellow leftist student in the sociology
doctoral program who had an infant and was going through a messy divorce. He
yelled at me and accused me of taking advantage of the poor black young men in
my draft board. I disagreed, saying I wasn’t doing anything but following the
law. If the Clerk of the Board was protecting my ass it wasn’t because of
anything I had done or asked to be done. It was pure serendipity on my part and
I was thankful as hell no matter what reasons she had for protecting me. I had
stumbled into a great deal and wasn’t about to fuck it up. He stomped off,
visibly steaming.
Several weeks later I learned that as soon as his divorce
decree was final his vindictive ex-wife sent a copy to his Selective Service
board. He was drafted a few days later. Two or three days after receiving his
induction notice he shot and killed himself rather than submit to the draft.
When I heard about his death, my first thought was, why the hell didn’t he go
to Canada and fuck the draft? I would have in a heartbeat had I found myself in
that situation. His death upset me a great deal but . . . what could I or
anyone do?
December 1, 1969, marked the date of the first Selective
Service (conscription) lottery held since 1942. But, because I was 26, married,
and had a child, I was not eligible for the lottery, especially since Congress
had never declared war. Had I been eligible, my lottery number would have been
112 and my skinny white ass would have been drafted. But, during those several years
that the Vietnam War went from nearly invisible to hot on all burners, that
little old lady protected my ass. Without her counsel I would have changed
draft boards and exposed my tender body to the terrors of boot camp and then the
rigors of military service.
It should be noted that I had started 1966 as vaguely
favoring U.S. involvement in Vietnam. During that summer I worked at the St.
Louis County Planning Department with a young woman named Ginger Harris, who strongly
opposed the War. Arguing with her over our lunch breaks slowly led to a sea
change in my position. By the end of summer 1966, I was 100 percent opposed to
the War and couldn’t imagine what I’d do if drafted, though Canada beckoned. But,
by that time I had been saved by my own personal, white-haired, Fairy Godmother
and seldom actively worried about being drafted, though the specter of being
forced into the military was never far from my mind.
Many years ago, after thinking long and hard about that
situation, I came to the conclusion that the U of F grad student who excoriated
me for elitist behavior had been right. No, I had not precipitated what transpired
or even thought the possibility existed of suggesting it to the Clerk of the
Board. But I had directly benefited from the white privilege shared by the
Clerk and me. Of course, I had no way of knowing if a white or black guy from
my local draft board had been drafted in my place. So, whether I had benefited
unfairly from her action is somewhat up in the air. Though it is certain that
my local board had more black registrants than white, thus the chance of a
black guy being sucked up in the draft instead of me was high.
Did I ever consider back then that I had benefited unfairly
from the Clerk’s unanticipated patronage? Of course I did. But, since I hated the
Vietnam War, I rationalized the actions of the Clerk and my acquiescence and
simply put the situation out of my mind. I was tremendously relieved at not
being forced to join the military or to flee to Canada, a choice I had
considered a great deal though I’ll never be certain if I would have followed
through since Sandy strongly opposed it. Once safe from being drafted, I did
not allow myself to think about how that security had come about.
