And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam…

In my news streams today I see that Country Joe McDonald has passed away, and I don’t think there is anyone of my generation and those older kids who came of draft age during the Vietnam war who aren’t replaying that song in their heads now, like when they were teenagers back in the day wondering if they would live to be adults, or breath their last in some far away jungle for the sake of Realpolitick, the Domino Theory, and the egos of various presidents, generals, and cabinet members. Or get fried in a nuclear holocaust between us and Russia. For all the same reasons.

I’m sure a lot of us have vivid memories of those times, most of them horrible. Let me tell you about mine. The day I almost got drafted and sent to war.

It started, as it did for young American males in the late 60s – early 70s, with the obligatory trip to the local draft office when you turned 18. At 18 I was a skinny little gay teenager, coming off his first broken heart after my high school crush’s family suddenly moved away, and so rail thin a friend’s mother once asked him if I was a heroin addict. But no…I was your usual teenage boy with a physiology that could snarf down candy bars, doughnuts, cheeseburgers, fries and sodas and not gain so much as an ounce. How I wish some days I still had a body that could do that.

Looking at me back then you wouldn’t think I was G.I. Joe material, but when a nation needs cannon fodder for a war nobody but the politicians and generals wanted size doesn’t matter. Much.

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?

My draft office was in the basement of the old Rockville post office. After my 18th birthday I presented myself to them as required by law, and as I sat while the clerk behind the desk typed up my forms I glanced around the room, and saw a sign they’d posted over the door…

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

Ha ha. And happy birthday young man! Maybe you’ll have another one.

I was issued my draft card, which by law I had to carry with me at all times. And as it turned out, almost immediately afterward I got this letter in the mail…

Notice the word “ORDER”. You are ordered to report. Not asked. Not told. Ordered. That’s how it was. There was a war on and nobody really understood why we were in it until Daniel Ellsberg leaked copies of a 7,000-page top-secret Department of Defense study to the New York Times and The Washington Post. That study detailed 25 years of American involvement in Vietnam, and not so incidentally the torrent of lies aimed deceiving the public and congress about the Realpolitik motivating that war, it’s actual scope, and our glorious progress in defeating world communism and keeping the dominoes from falling. 

There was no declaration of war, there was only the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution giving the president authorization for a “military action” to defend US military forces. But the basis for that resolution, that our destroyers in the area had been attacked, was a lie. There was no attack. The American public would not know that for decades. But it got us where the generals and the politicians wanted us.

You hear people speak after these mass casualty disasters, of all the lost potential, all the things that could have been, all the progress in the arts and sciences that might have been made, only to end up buried in so many thousands of graves. But in the rarified halls of power where their Realpolitik hallucinations mattered more than the lives of the kids they were sending off to war, of course war had to be the case and never mind the cost. Those were other people’s children.

You hear a lot of things said about my generation and the 1960s/early 1970s. If you want to really understand those times you need to look at, really look at, what that war did to this country. How many parents never got to see their kids have families of their own, and grandchildren they could dote on. And Vietnam went communist anyway.

So there I was the early morning of October 4, 1972 waiting at the designated draft office bus stop with several dozen other teenage boys, wondering if that morning would be the last time mom ever saw me alive.

They loaded us onto a couple Greyhound busses to drive us to Fort Meade for the pre-induction physicals. But before we were driven off, some men from the Navy and Air Force got on the bus and told this group of trapped and terrified teenage boys they’d get a better deal from them if they enlisted now. Some left the bus with them.

When we got to Fort Meade we were made to strip down to just our underwear, weighed (I did not know this at the time, but the moment they weighed me I failed the exam, but they kept on with it anyway), and then led to stand in two lines for an initial examination.

I’ve told this story here before…

…about the morning I came to my sixth grade class and I saw that some kids from the previous year had come to class before we got there to visit their old teachers. And they’d written about their experiences in junior high on the chalkboard, and how much fun it was going to be for us when it was our turn. I started reading…and then I came to this line…

Tell them not to worry about group showers. It’s no big deal.

I wish I had a picture of my face just then. My jaw dropped. I was horrified. What!? WHAT!? WHAT!!!??? Suddenly I was no longer looking forward to high school, junior or otherwise.

So there I am in this line of several dozen other teenage boys in their underwear and you might be thinking as you read this that I‘m in gay kid paradise and it wasn’t that at all. They wouldn’t let us put our clothes back on for the entire two hour ritual and I spent them in a kind of state of shell shock. I am just not a clothing optional kinda guy, and that was the most degrading thing I’d ever experienced up to that time or ever since. But it was the point being made, right then and there: From now on you are government property. 

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?

A pair of doctors went up and down the lines, making us take deep breaths while listening to heartbeats, checking pulses, examining teeth, skin (I guess looking for tattoos). They made us drop our underwear, bend over and spread our butt cheeks while they walked up the lines looking for I have no idea what. Then they walked the lines feeling each kid’s balls and telling them to cough. I’m told that lets them detect hernias. We were cattle being sized up for grade. One kid across from me started laughing uncontrollably when the doctor cupped his hand around his balls and the doctor quickly moved on.

We were allowed to pull our underwear back up. Then led to booths where eyesight and hearing were tested…still wearing only our underwear. Then, still wearing only our underwear, we were led into something like a classroom where were put under oath, and told to sit in some small student desks. We were handed sheets of paper, told to fill out our names, and then look at each of the line items and check Yes or No. Are you an American citizen? Were both your parents citizens? What is your race? Ancestry? There were the names of various subversive organizations and we had to check if we’d ever been a member of any of them. I forget now if the American Civil Liberties Union was one of them, or the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Then I came to this question…

Are you a homosexual?

I looked at it carefully, weighing my options. I had just sworn to tell the truth, and the truth was I knew damn well by then that I was, and the honest answer was Yes. And answering that question honestly would have probably kept me out of the army and Vietnam. But it would have also probably got me placed onto some police and FBI lists somewhere, which would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was 1972, sodomy was illegal in nearly every state, and those laws were used against us in so many ways never mind having sex. You could be denied employment, housing, an array of professional licenses. They would have probably told mom and I still don’t like thinking about what would have happened then. It could have been that every time somebody’s child disappeared I’d get a couple policemen knocking at the door.

So I lied. I checked No.

At the end of the ritual I was told that since I was eleven pounds underweight I would be put back on the bus for Rockville. As I remember there were a couple others of us on it. I was told they’d call me back for another physical in six months. But before that could happen Nixon turned off the draft and I was never inducted into the Army and never had to go to war.

I have no idea how many of those other kids that were with me during the pre-induction ritual never made it back to their country alive. But I can still see their faces.

After Nixon turned off the draft, for a brief period of time, nobody had to register for the draft. There’s a subset of baby boomers who never felt its touch, and who keep being lumped in with the rest of us. I met one of them once on a gay BBS I did some volunteer work for. He was staunchly conservative, and a big fan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. 

Eventually they bought draft registration back, but so far nobody has been forced to join the Army or go die in another war nobody wants. Yet.

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for?

I’d post a photo of my maternal grandfather Albert (whose name mom gave to me) in his uniform but I still need to scan that one in. He served in the Philippines in the late 1800s…I don’t know if he later served in WWI or not. But oddly enough even though he died long before I was born, I owe much of the career I have now to him. After the Army, he ran his own business building and servicing radios and whenever mom saw something in me that reminded her of her dad she encouraged it…which is why I got a taste early in life for fiddling with electronic gizmos, which led to my building my own computers back in the IBM-PC/DOS days, and why I’m earning a good living now as a systems software engineer (my job title).

But I did scan this photo of mom and her first boyfriend, and fiancé, Morris. Morris was Jewish, and my granddad Albert, according to mom, didn’t much care for Jews until he met Morris. According to mom he came to like Morris very much and approved of them getting married.

But Morris was in the Navy during WWII, and so I was told, his ship sailed into Nagasaki harbor after Japan surrendered. He later told her that his ship was unable to move for a time, due to the number of bodies floating in the water. Whether it was the sight of that, or other things he saw during the war, or whether it was a thing that would have happened to him regardless, he fell into severe mental illness after the war and his family had to institutionalize him. So mom lost her boyfriend to madness, and if the war alone didn’t do that to him, it definitely contributed. Before his family took him away mom said, he used to scare her fondling his big army knife, stroking his face and arms and body with it like he was going to cut himself, talking about the corpses he’d seen with their guts spilled out.

So when we remember and honor our service men and women, let us please also dedicate ourselves to supporting them after the war too, and their widows and widowers, and their orphans, because our thanks are hollow otherwise, and especially to dedicate ourselves to not sending anymore of our neighbors to war, if it is humanly possible to prevent it. The wars don’t end for them merely because the shooting stopped.