Letter to Steve

In which I try to explain what it was like facing the draft in 1970.

You might want your music streaming service handy.

“ Fate leads the willing, the unwilling get dragged.”

Seneca

I got my drivers license the first week of June, 1969. For a kid living in the country, eight miles from town, that little card was a pass to freedom. So on a warm evening, I got cleaned up after work and asked my mom to borrow the car. “Where are you going?” “I don’t know, just for a ride.” On the way down the front steps I picked a yellow rose. A quarter mile down the road I saw a girl sitting on my neighbors’ front steps. I recognized her, Andy ...., but I don’t think I had ever met her. I pulled in, got out, and handed her the rose.

There were 550,000 American troops in Vietnam that summer. Over 500 were being killed every month. Richard Nixon was elected the previous November on a promise of bringing the troops home and restoring law and order. By then the war was so unpopular that Lyndon Johnson hadn’t run for reelection. Most Americans saw the war as a mess. The word quagmire was common. But the country was bitterly divided about what to do. Things had only gotten worse since two years earlier when our Vermont senator George Aiken said, “Why don’t we just declare victory and go home?” Or words to that effect. Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” still remembered World War II and to them, America losing a war was unthinkable. They also still ran the country.

In March the Chicago Seven had been charged with conspiracy to cross state lines to incite riots at the Democratic Convention in August ’68. What I remember are the black-and-white images on our old TV of police beating protesters with clubs. Graham Nash sang, “So your brother’s bound and gagged and they chained him to a chair.” I had that album or I should say I had that bootleg 8 track tape. He was talking about Bobby Seales, who was only there for a few hours and spoke to the demonstrators as a last minute replacement for Eldridge Cleaver. They were speaking out because young black men, along with poor and rural whites were, for the most part, the ones dying. Between October ’66 and June ’69, 246,000 soldiers were recruited. 41% were black, though they made up 11% of the population.

In April 1967 Martin Luther King Jr organized a protest of 125,000 against the war and Muhammad Ali refused the draft, saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” He also said, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” He was stripped of his titles, banned from boxing and charged with draft evasion. On that same old TV I had seen Ali trash talk and then beat Sonny Liston and I believed he was fearless. I admired him for his stand.

For the most part, whites of means were able to stay home. College deferments (Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, many more) bogus health claims (Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, many more) pulled strings to jump the long line for the National Guard and Army Reserve (George W. Bush, many more)

My job that summer of '69 was mowing the golf course at the old Hyde Manor which the owner, Eddie Dhlos, kept mowed religiously for years after the last guest had played. When I was 16, Eddie’s financial troubles were such that he was spending the week in New York City at his upholstery business and coming up here on weekends. My job was to keep the golf course mowed and Eddy wasn’t here and didn’t care when I did it, just as long as I did it. Andy’s job for the summer was babysitting her two younger brothers at their camp on Burr Pond. So every morning I would get up early and mow for a few hours, and when I knew her parents had left for work, I would go over and spend the day with Andy at camp. When I knew they were going to be coming home, I would leave and go back to the golf course and mow for a few more hours. One day, Andy told me her dad had said, “I don’t know that fellow you’re dating, but he sure is a worker. Every morning when I go to work he’s already out there mowing and every night when I come home he’s still out there mowing.” I don’t know if he ever figured that one out or not.

In July, we watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon on our old TV, Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion and 537 American soldiers were killed in action. In August, Karen Griffin told me she was going to a 3-day concert somewhere near Woodstock, N.Y. Did I want to go? I said, “Nah, I should work.” In September, Andy went back to Sacred Heart High School in Newport.

In November, we learned about the My Lai massacre. On March 16, 1965, between 300 and 500 unarmed, mostly women and children, were killed by US Army soldiers. In December, the draft lottery was announced. If you drew a low number and you didn’t have one of the handful of excuses (see Phil Ochs “Draft Dodger Rag” for a fairly complete list) you were going. Only 474 American soldiers died that month.

Andy was sending me a letter every day. I was sending her letters frequently — or infrequently, depending on who you asked. I was in a Rock ’n Roll band. We were practicing two nights a week and usually playing at least one night. My bandmates, Jim, Larry and Bobby, were among the best friends I’ve ever had and playing with them was as much fun as I’ve ever had. My turn at the lottery was still more than a year away, so why would I worry about it yet? Andy’s sister, Cricket, was married to Rob ... who had joined the Navy. They had traveled and lived in exotic places like Hawaii and — Iceland? The Navy had taught Rob electronics and as soon as they got home he got a good job repairing TVs. Add in the house and two kids and they were living the dream. Or at least Andy’s dream. I, on the other hand, had no clue what I wanted, other than maybe to sing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” (protest song, naturally) at, I don’t know, Shea stadium or one of those places I had heard of and not seen yet.

In April 1970, the US invaded Cambodia, setting off more huge protests. Most Americans knew the war was a disaster but there was a bitter divide between the young people in the streets and the people at home who voted for Nixon to end the riots. So he cracked down. In May, the National Guard was called in to quell demonstrations at Kent State University. They opened fire on the protestors. They killed four and wounded several more. Within days Neil Young had written and Cosby, Stills, Nash and Young had recorded “Ohio”, half protest song, half lament. That month 428 soldiers died. Congress had had enough and in June tried to take back some control by repealing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which had given the president power to “Wage war by any means.”

I don’t specifically remember that, no surprise there. However, I do specifically remember our Honor Society awards assembly. The whole school, about 750 students, would assemble in the auditorium for the Induction Ceremony. The names of the inductees were kept secret but their parents were notified and invited to attend. Once the students were seated the lights were turned down and the parents would sneak in at the back. I had my old Rambler by then and I said to Jim, my friend and bandmate, “We aren’t going to be inducted. Let’s sneak out and leave.” Which we did. And they called his name three times. And his father, who took a half-day off from his mechanics’ job and went home and cleaned up and drove to the school, never shared with me how he felt about it. And his mother pretended to forgive me — but she never did. About a week before graduation they announced over the intercom that any senior who did not pony up the $14 that represented their share of the class debt would not receive a diploma. Our class was like that. We had the only paperback yearbook in the history of the school. We didn’t have any natural leaders in our class. A lot of us weren’t sure if we believed in leaders anymore. Recreational drugs may have been a factor. It was, after all, the 60’s. Many years later when they asked Newt Gingrich if he ever smoked pot he said, “Let me put it this way, I was alive in the 60s.” I got a diploma, so apparently I came up with the $14. Andy wanted to know what I was going to do. How about the Navy? I had no idea, but on the heels of Kent State and Nixon’s evil, duplicitous behavior, I was pissed and Muhammad Ali and John Fogerty and Neil Young were guiding lights, not brother-in-law Rob. One night in the old Rambler when she brought the Navy up again I told her that. And out of pique I said maybe our differences were irreconcilable. Or something like that. She said she thought I was right. Within a week I told her I thought I was wrong but she said, “No, you were right.”

I washed dishes at the North Forty on Lake Dunmore that summer of '70 and was taken under the wing of the owner, Dexter Reynolds, who convinced me against my will to take a couple courses I needed that year and consider college. In July they drew the selective service lottery numbers and that year they took everyone with a number below 280. That brought home that my number was coming up and I had a decision to make. On the way to work I would pop in a bootleg tape and Country Joe McDonald was saying “Uncle Sam needs your help again, got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam” or I’d punch in Creedence and John Fogerty saying, “It ain’t me, it ain’t me. I ain’t no Fortunate Son".

Between 1965 and 1975 40,000 Americans went to Canada to avoid the draft. On Jimmy Carter‘s first day in office he pardoned them. But Canada had welcomed them, most had become citizens, and many never came back. About 3,200 went to jail.

One of my jobs in that year of uncertainty was for a “shopper.” A free paper called the Budgeteer. Part of the job was driving the owner, Charlie .... He was an alcoholic and had lost his license so I would pick him up (sometimes I would have to get him out of bed) and drive him on his rounds selling ads. In the afternoon he would “sell ads” in bars and eventually I would get tired of waiting in the car and go in and drag him out and take him home. Talk about enabling. We had a competitor, the Rutland Shopper, that was owned by a right winger who would write editorials about the war and the “ungrateful, dirty, cowardly hippies” and what should be done to them. So while waiting in the car for Charlie one day I thought “Wouldn’t it be great to get a debate going with our rival?” and so I wrote an anti-war response. The gist was that if your mother asked you to help her rob a bank would your duty be to help her? Or to do whatever you could to stop her? When Charlie came out I gave him what I hoped was going to be the first opinion piece for a new Budgeteer opinion section. Charlie read as we drove to the next prospect. Then he turned to me and said, “Wow, you should send this to Playboy.” That was the end of that discussion. There was no way he was going to print anything that incendiary in the Budgeteer.

But I was still stuck with the dilemma. Photos of slaughtered women and children. A naked young girl running, screaming, burned by Napalm. Body bags. The old men selling these wars would learn from this one that if you wanted people to continue to send their children as cannon fodder you should probably limit the photographic evidence. So we don’t see the body bags anymore. Add to the visual prompts the all too cogent arguments by people like Martin Luther King Jr, not to mention Country Joe McDonald and whoever came up with “Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Chastity.”

I didn’t fit any of the evasion categories so eloquently laid out by Phil Ochs. For me, it came down to two. Canada or jail. Canada seemed like you were making a statement of the “Hell no, I won’t go” variety. But in my mind the real patriots were the ones going to prison for what they believed. I felt the “bone spurs” (Trump) and “pilonidal cyst” (Rush Limbaugh) types were the real Draft Dodgers. While I waited, not knowing what I would decide, Nixon carpet bombed North Vietnam, trying to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate a peace deal, launched a failed incursion into Laos, gradually brought home troops and gave up territory in the name of “peace with dignity.” And over 400 American soldiers and untold numbers of Vietnamese died every month.

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"If you were born to hang, you'll never drown."

Joe Gagnon on being told he was lucky

to survive crashing his log truck

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For me, in the end, it was an anti-climax. In 1971 they were predicting if your number was 150 or lower you would be drafted. In August they drew the numbers and my birthday came up number 232. Soon after I found my peacenik, hippie, soulmate and Andy found her TV repair man. They actually only drafted the first 92 numbers from the ’71 draft, only the first 10 from the ’72 Draft, and they abolished the draft in January ’73. By the time Saigon fell in April 1975, 58,000 Americans, about 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and 2 million civilians had died.