The key characteristic of my years in college (1968 to 1972), the one thing that really made it special (you could say), sort of like living in a big rambling rooming house that everybody knew had been built over a sinkhole, was not:
the number of lectures sat through,
the number of term papers written,
the number of textbooks bought, and the oatmealy smell of the stacks of new books at the
bookstore,
the number of football games attended,
the terrific number of hours spent at the radio station when I should have been studying,
the amount of dope smoked,
the number of late-evening feeds at IHOP, Ken’s, the No-Name, the How Yen Han,
feeling, on a campus of thousands, very alone,
feeling that I knew nothing, that I must be the most ignorant person on campus, in the city,
and maybe in the entire world,
sleeping soundly through the arrival of the tactical police, who came in force at dawn,
batons swinging, to oust the students occupying nearby University Hall.
No, it wasn’t those things, though the memories remain vivid. For me, the key characteristic was my four-year relationship with the Selective Service System, the government board that decided which men would be conscripted into the military, and when. (Things have changed. We have a volunteer military now. The SSS still exists, though, in the event the military requires mass conscription again.) Though you might hear from them infrequently, the draft board’s power over you was limitless. All men were “classified,” from the time they registered onward. (Women weren’t drafted, weren’t required to register for the draft, and thus weren’t classified.) Your classification could change. Depending on how you were classified when the military needed you, your induction could be “deferred,” temporarily or forever.
If I become a First Lieutenant
Would you put my photo on your piano?
The album “Bookends,” which included “Punky’s Dilemma,” a silly little song with a dark heart, was getting a lot of radio play in 1968. (I don’t know how Mr. Simon and Mr. Garfunkel were classified.) Men classified “1-A” were “available for service” right away, and when the need was great, as it was 1968-1971, these men soon found themselves in uniform. College students were typically classified “2-S,” denoting a man engaged full-time in a course of study at an “accredited college.” At that time, it was certainly a system based on privilege. If you were at college, you were judged to have Good Prospects, and therefore were excused from the grueling regimens of training camp, and the dirty little wars where you could be killed. A tragic waste, that would be... and a reason for Mom and Dad to change how they voted next time. If you weren’t at college, you were judged to have few Good Prospects, and were sent to wherever a bunch of over-the-hill white men in Washington decided you should go, for whatever cobbled-together reasons, because, let’s face it, you were expendable. That was the accepted norm.
So it became very important to stay in college and cling to your deferment no matter what, unless you happened to be keen on going to war. You would continue to be “deferred” until you were no longer enrolled; by that time, circumstances might have changed and the military might no longer have plans to call you up.
What if you left that college midway? That big East Coast college there. The one you maybe were feeling wasn’t good enough after all, not for you. The one your proud grandmother was paying for, the one your father graduated from, the one your great-grandfather taught at. That one! Say you wanted to figure out how to transfer to some other four-year school, one that would be a better fit for you, being careful to keep your shield up, to be enrolled at all times in some actual college somewhere or other, should the draft board decide to take a peek at you. Say you needed a break from that way of living altogether, and wanted to work for a while, or travel around the country, or go back to your old bedroom under the eaves in your parents’ house and pull the covers over your head. You would lose your deferment as soon as you failed, at the beginning of any semester, to file SSS Form 109, the document that certified you were a real student. Your local draft board would immediately send you an Order to Report. I can tell you that there are few pieces of mail you can receive that are more chilling to read. In a short time, you would be off to training camp and eventually, I suppose, to Vietnam, well-known processor of young men (and women) into broken dolls, into human remains. This we all knew, in 1968, to one extent or another, because the Vietnam conflict made a stink that wrinkled your nose, all the way around here on the other side of the world.
Vietnam could be viewed as a collection of numbers games. Our success there was said to be measureable via the periodic counts of enemy fighters killed. The higher the number, the better we must be doing. And so there was pressure on the counters to count amply, to err on the lofty side. The higher-ups liked it better that way. Then there were the often-reported continually updated numbers of U.S. armed forces personnel/people in the fight, and how many more were going to be needed to “finish the job,” how the Army (especially) couldn’t be expected to “finish the job” unless this or that many more were drafted and shipped ASAP to Southeast Asia. Because of course more troops were always required, the job having turned out to be tougher than originally thought. Replacements were also constantly needed for the soldiers already there who were being wounded or killed at such a great rate.
Old Roger, draft-dodger, leaving by the basement door,
Everybody knows what he’s tippy-toein’ down there for...
Tim O’Brien, or his character, in The Things They Carried, couldn’t believe that they were going to take him, either. “The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. I remember opening up the letter, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head, a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good for this war. It couldn’t happen. A mistake maybe—a foul-up in the paperwork. I was no soldier. I hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping out. I hated dirt and tents and mosquitoes. I didn’t know a rifle from a slingshot. Beyond all this was the raw fact of terror: I did not want to die, certainly not then, not there, not in a wrong war.” His objections reflected an assumption that one’s individual character and preferences would count for something / ought to be taken into account / maybe would be considered. They wouldn’t.
My order to report arrived early in September of 1969. I had neglected (and never neglected again) to submit my Form 109 “in a timely manner,” and accordingly, my draft board pounced. The order really did say “Greeting” near the top. It spelled out very clearly where and when I was to report, and what I was to bring (practically nothing). It was clear that I probably wouldn’t be coming home again for a long time, that induction was the beginning of a long journey with an uncertain end. The time when I could move freely through the world would be coming to an end, and quickly. It was unbelievable, but very believable. Panicked, I ran to the office my college had set up to deal with students’ draft-board issues. I showed my induction order to a woman at the front desk, this woman that saved my life. “Oh, that’s nothing,” she said, barely looking up. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll just send them another 109.”
So it was working! I was staying out of the army! I was beating the System with my own system, one of Privilege! Of course, someone went in my place, if you wanted to think of it that way. (Isn’t that what people always said? Or was that only what I said?) So I was carrying guilt around in my head, guilt and fear and confusion and a lot of fuzzy thinking. And by 1971, I was growing tired of the pretense. My classes, courses, my work towards my degree, lacked meaning, direction, purpose. My grades were slipping and I couldn’t seem to stop them, couldn’t seem to care. If I flunked out, the draft would be waiting for me, and it was becoming difficult to care. If the war had continued, I would have gone. (The option of fleeing to Canada never entered my mind.) There was a draft lottery by then, a fairer system where your birthdate was randomly assigned a number from 1 to 365 (mine was 103 — another number!). Low numbers would be called up first. Number 103 was not a “safe” number when the lottery began, but by 1972 our participation in the conflict was “winding down,” and the army no longer needed as many soldiers, and weren’t taking recruits with numbers that high. The nation was sick of war, sick of arguing about the war, and, I think, realized that we could not “win” it in any real sense, and just wanted to stop the dying and get our collective ass-kicking over with.
My! So many quotations in this little piece! Well, isn’t that what a lot of college time was about? Quoting other people?
Quote other people
and cite the sources.
That way you don’t have to
join the armed forces.
While we’re at it, here’s another quote. This is a comment by someone named “Virgil,” edited by me for length and clarity (a lot more clarity than I was carrying around in my head during college), which appears below the YouTube audio of “Punky’s Dilemma.” (Go ahead, look it up and listen to it. It’s just over two minutes long, I can wait.)
“1968. A sensitive young man (me at 16 going on 17) hears this song. He is fascinated. The song is truly delightful. Beautiful even. But ya gotta understand. The world was changing. Muscle cars, miniskirts, and marijuana: the life! But they had this war going on in Vietnam. People were dying. My hometown newspaper posted photos of dead hometown boys every week. In the small city I lived in, we could see 12 to 15 faces, every week. Dead friends. We used to talk about it at lunch in the cafeteria. ‘Man, they got Jessie Ray last week, and his cousin Lawrence two weeks ago.’ Punky’s Dilemma was ALL of our dilemma at that time. You could have a good time at the municipal pool or drive-in, but you might be called up to go and die. And the line about, ‘if I become a first lieutenant, would you put my photo on your piano?’ Folks, in 1968, there were still plenty of photos of handsome young men in their uniforms who were killed in WWII, still placed carefully and dusted weekly on many a piano in my town. A lighthearted tune in style for sure, but in the vernacular of the time, a ‘heavy’ piece of music.”
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