11 July 2003

The Draft

I got a couple notes about a story I wrote which mentioned Arlon Guthry, son of the legendary Folk singer of the thrities, and remembered not as much for his classic song about smuggling drugs into California ("Flying into Los Angelese, Bringing in a couple of keys, Don't touch my bags, if you please, Mr. Customs Man....")

But that won't be the song that is his legacy. Everybody of that generation will remember Alice's Restaurant. That is an icon as much as the memorable nights on television, the screen flickering a bit. We didn't know how crude it was going to seem someday.

A man who has risen high in his trade wrote me back, remembering: "I was in Law School downstate and on my way back to the school from a weekend in D.C. in my 1967 Plymouth Baracuda (remember that big glass bubble window in the back?) and the song came on south of Warrenton on Rt 29.  It was a Sunday evening about 9PM.  The song ended well south of Culpepper as I was about to lose the station.  Both Arlo and I were tired.  I still chuckle as I listen to it and relive that period...."

We were young and the '60s seemed to produce those black-and-white moments that galvanized. The Kennedy assassination produced the Lee Harvey Oswald murder. I think it was a Staurday. I was eating a grilled cheese sandwhich when the strange little man in the overcoat and the fedora walked through the crowd and plugged Lee right on camera.

The night the LBJ said he wasn't going to run for reelection was one for the ages. My associate linked it together perfectly, since these Presidential Pronouncements had direct impact on the lives of draft-age men. He wrote: "...as I neared Centreville on another Sunday night was President Lyndon Johnson's announcement that he would not run for reelection.  I remember that the announcer was so thrown by this that when he ran through a list of probable Democrat candidates that he forgot HHH the VP.  Alas, the announcement and policies of the POTUS can too late for me.  He rovolked my student status at the end of that first year of Law School and here I am today.  Some days I thank him.  On others he's still the SOB I thought he was at the time."

We were all stunned. I was in high school at the time, but all of us knew what happened. You went to college or you got drafted and became a rifelman in the jungles of Southeast Asia. We had grumbled about LBJ for so long, demonized the guy, really, that the display of humanity left us stunned. In May of 1970, Dick Nixon came on the TV to make a special announcement. The desk he sat behind seemed to protect him, wrap him in authority.

"Good evening, my fellow Americans" he said. Remembmer the dark hooded eyes? He started out briskly. "Ten days ago, in my report to the Nation on Vietnam, I announced a decision to withdraw an additional 150,000 Americans from Vietnam over the next year. I said then that I was making that decision despite our concern over increased enemy activity in Laos, in Cambodia, and in South Vietnam.  At that time, I warned that if I concluded that increased enemy activity in any of these areas endangered the lives of Americans remaining in Vietnam, I would not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation. 

Despite that warning, North Vietnam has increased its military aggression in all these areas, and particularly in Cambodia. After full consultation with the National Security Council, Ambassador Bunker, General Abrams, and my other advisers, I have concluded that the actions of the enemy in the last 10 days clearly endanger the lives of Americans who are in Vietnam now and would constitute an unacceptable risk to those who will be there after withdrawal of another 150,000. To protect our men who are in Vietnam and to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization programs, I have concluded that the time has come for action....."

There was nothing that did not make sense about what the President said. But the reaction across the country was palpable, particularly in the Student Community. There actually was one, in those days. We had the vote, too. There was a lot of hot air expended over the incursion to Cambodia and operations agains the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The draft was a central issue to all young men right up through 1973. For more than 50 years, Selective Service and the registration requirement for America's young men to provide manpower to the U.S. Armed Forces. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, creating the country's first peacetime draft and formally established the Selective Service System as an independent Federal agency. From 1948 until 1973, during both peacetime and periods of conflict, men were drafted to fill vacancies in the armed forces which could not be filled through voluntary means.

There was an elaborate classification system. Everyone remembers "4-F," or medically ineligible. It was a mark of shame in WWII, useful in 1951-54, and considered a positive blessing in some circles between 1966-1973.  The things young men used to do before the draft physical! Hard to believe, and Arlo sung about that part of the student experience, too:

"you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.  I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning."

And of course the common wisdom was that if you were nuts they wouldn't take you. Arlo captured that strategy:

"Shrink, I want to kill.  I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill.  Kill.  I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth.  Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL."  And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL."  And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

It didn't work for Arlo, though his criminal status over the garbage incident eventually got him out of it. Most of us didn't get to the physical part right away. If you were in a regular and approved course of study you were automatically assigned full-time student status. I got my 2-S student deferment in 1969, and it was renewed every six months by the local draft board back in Grand Rapids. That meant we always had a couple cards, ready to burn in acts of symbolism without meaning, since the current valid paper was still safe in the wallet. I don't know if burning the official, if expired, paper was considered a crime. Nobody came around to ask.

I don't remember how it worked, precisely. I turned 18 in June of 1969. The first lottery was held that December. I don't know why I was not in that pool; I got my number the next yearf, in December of 1970. I watched the TV, black and white, of course, and 70. I teetered through 1971- at the hieght of the call-ups the conventional wisdom was that they would go as high as the mid-one hundreds. The war lurched through the peace talks in Paris in 1972 and by 1973, and the pull-out began. By the time I graduated the deferrment was irrelevant. The need for troops diminished and the draft, and the deferment system that was so abused ended.

My brother, class of '71, drew #1. It was like getting hit by a silver bullet, and it determined the course of his life. He joined Army ROTC and when the draft ended, a week before he had to take the benefits and get serious about commitment. The doc at the classification told him he looked "like an ideal infantry officer."

My brother left pieces of his uniform all down the corridor and into the parking lot when the announcement came that they were no longer going to call anybody up and the numbers didn't matter.

In 1973, the draft ended and the U.S. converted to an All-Volunteer military. The registration requirement was suspended in April 1975. For most that was that. But for the two years in between there was something very strange. The requirements for personnel continued, albiet at very diminished levels. We were still at full strength in Korea and Germany. But the deferment system was ended in 1973. My pal Dave, fiesty younger brother of one of my best friends, got a notice from the draft board while he was still in school. He got drafted out of his undergraduate program to serve in the Army's 2nd Infantry Division in the Land of he Morning Calm. He was angry. Jeeeze, was he angry. He wqas so angry that the Army finally decided he was a hard case and it took his Congressman to get him out of the stockade in Korea. The Draft determined a lot about Dave's life, and confirmed a sense of injustice.

The Selective Service System was energized again in 1980 by President Carter in his timid response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We were floating around in the northern Arabian Sea watching the development of the Soviet invasion force, and one of the squadron intel guys became quite and authority on places we would learn about in a much more intimate fashion. When the Russians finally came, rousting the Kahlkis and the Parchamists alike, President Carter stiffened our national spine and announced that this was serious and he was going to do something in response.

We would not participate in the Moscow Olympics. Remember the little bear mascot the Russians had developed? Did they give it a cute name to put a playful face on global communism? Was it Mischa the Bear?

In the end I just shrugged. Finally beat the draft.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra