This week, my longtime online friendly nemesis, Al (CW13), snarkily asked me what branch of the military I had been in. The answer is none. I was of a time and age where I certainly could have—and probably should have—gone into the military, but weird stuff happened. Being a kid who grew up in The Projects, I certainly wasn’t able to buy myself free, like Chicken George wanted to (in Roots) and like Even-More-Chicken Donald Trump was able to.
I had to go into downtown L.A. for my first draft physical. There were over 700 guys there that day and it was a madhouse. The military guys went through the lines and grabbed the guys who had shown up drunk and/or stoned. (The rumor was that if you had a drug problem, the Army wouldn’t take you. Yeah…no. As a matter of fact, if they took you to Vietnam, there was a chance that they would provide you with a drug problem, free of charge.) Then we had to take a test that the worst student at the worst charter school could have passed on his worst day. They had multiple-choice questions for which all of the answers were correct.
Sometime after that, we were in this large room. On the wall was a sign that I’ll never forget. It said “Strip to the Waist From Both Ends.” I remember thinking that I really didn’t want to be part of that particular organization. Plus, in the back of my head was the fact that there were already four guys from my general neighborhood who had died in Vietnam.
We had to be checked for “rupture,” which is always fun, especially when you’re not sure that the “doctor” is changing rubber gloves. Then we had to pee in a cup and put the cup on a shelf. Some Army guy walked along and put litmus paper strips in all of the urine samples. When one was the wrong color, the guy would just point at somebody and say, “You! Step out of line.” The military became more and more appealing as the day went along.
A rumor went around the building that day that a guy had shown up without a left arm and they sent him home to go get a note from his family doctor stating that he was missing his left arm. To this day, I have no idea if that actually happened, but it sure made for lively conversation over the sack lunches they provided us.
By mid-afternoon, we were all in this big auditorium, waiting for our names to be called. Once called, you’d walk down to the front of the room, grab the papers they handed you and then exit the building. I’ve always wondered how many, if any, of the guys who were there that day would die in Southeast Asia.
When they called my name, I noticed that my papers were of a different color than most. I stopped and read it and it said that I had a serious knee problem and that I would have to take another physical in six months. After that day, I would go on to play football, basketball, baseball and tennis in college, followed by decades of pickup basketball and other sports and, even now, at this advanced age and weight, I STILL have never had any knee problems of any kind.
I read it quickly and walked out without saying a word. I didn’t feel guilty, thinking that some other guy would have to go in my place. Anybody whose knees were as messed up as that paper said would get identified by the Army before it was too late. In six months, I would have to go to either Fresno or Phoenix for another physical. I had always liked Isaac Hayes’ version of “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” so I chose Arizona.
I stopped by to see my mom before heading out to Phoenix. Some of the neighborhood kids were playing kickball and they asked if I wanted to take a turn. I kicked it and started running; first base was a tree and second was a clothesline pole. As I was running to second, a little kid who wasn’t in the game ran in front of me. I hurdled the kid and hit the round end of the clothesline pole with my temple. As soon as I hit the ground, I felt the blood pouring down my face.
I went to the Ghetto Clinic and they sewed me up. The doctor said I should go to the hospital but I said, “No, I have my Army physical tomorrow!” I couldn’t drive so I took the Greyhound to Phoenix. Skull fracture, severe concussion, blurred vision and I couldn’t hear out of my right ear (but my knee was fine). I was blissfully all messed up. I would have to take another physical in a year.
By then, my new lottery number was in the 300s and the draft was winding down. They sent me a letter saying to forget about it. At the time, I wondered if I had been spared so that I could do something great with my life. That really hasn’t happened so I’m hoping that a whole lot of little something goods will suffice. ■
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2019.
Danehy youve been doing good things for a long time.
The honorable and honest thing to do would have been to advise them your knee was fine. But then I suppose that never crossed your mind.
Ah, the memories.
A year after graduating high school I found myself failing my first year at Pima Community College, which they called Pima Junior College then. I was going no where fast without any direction. Enter the new Volunteer Army with its “Be all you can be” slogans with ads promising fun, travel and adventure — even though men were still being drafted and the war in Vietnam was still going strong — I was hooked.
When I walked into the recruiter’s office, they had a cow. There I was, a high school graduate, no criminal record, no alcohol or tobacco use — although at that time using both was almost a requirement for military members — and no drug use. I was a recruiter’s trifecta.
I passed all the tests with flying colors with one small glitch. I was slightly underweight. I was told to go home, drink plenty of banana shakes, and given a date to go to the Phoenix Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) for a physical. Once there, I again passed everything but the weight requirement. I had gained exactly five pounds and met the weight requirement in Tucson, but apparently in Phoenix, I was five pounds lighter.
I rode the bus home feeling dejected, but I was told that if I gained the necessary weight, I would be “good-to-go”.
After another week of banana shakes — something I cannot stomach to this day — I had gained another five pounds: However, when I went back to Phoenix, I was still five pounds short. I started to fear that I would not make the cut, when an officer at the MEPS stated that I could receive a waiver for being underweight, and that on the condition that I gained the necessary weight in Basic Combat Training (BCT) at Fort Ord, Calif., I would be in.
Thanks to generous helpings of chili-mac and other army cuisine that was “hot, brown and plenty of it” I made the grade.
As for the mystery of the five pounds… . Well it seems that it was easier to get a waiver for being underweight than overweight and with more overweight guys trying to join than underweight ones setting the scales lighter in Phoenix seemed like a good idea.
In all fairness thought, the guys I went to BCT with who had a few pounds extra lost their weight just as I gained mine.
Like Trump’s doctor who found those never-known-about-before bone spurs, there was a doctor in Tucson (late 1960s) who found knee problems for young guys who wanted to avoid the draft. I seem to remember he lost his medical license a few years later.
>The honorable and honest thing to do would have been to advise them your knee was fine.
It wouldn’t have mattered; the army doesn’t make mistakes. If a potential draftee were to suggest as much, they’d be yelled at and thrown out on their ear.
Yeah. I went through the same thing. I told them I had back problems and the xrayed me. I got sent home and eventually was 4F. I lost 20 of my high school buddies in Vietnam and will never forget them. In 2010 I had back surgery and was in the hospital for a week That 4F dogged me for decades as I couldn’t get a job as you had to declare your draft status.
I still have back problems but at least I’m alive. Vietnam was a joke. The French got creamed there and the Americans thought they could fix it.
I don’t miss those years and feel sorry for all of the “cannon fodder” that got sent there. It was a mistake that we seemed to have not learned from. I love America but we made a lot of dumb decisions then and later about war.
I am lucky to still be alive and wish we could pick our wars more intelligently.
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I joined the Army in 1963, following in the footsteps of another friend from the year before. Like him, I chose my specialty in the Army Security Agency. After 8 weeks basic training at Fort Ord, California I went ahead to my next assignment and a 26-week class at Fort Devens, Massachusetts at Cryptanalysis school.
From there to a special operations class at the National Security Agency in Maryland for one month and subsequent assignment to a duty station (Tuslog Det4) for a year in Sinop, Turkey.
After that I was assigned for a two-year duty in Japan at a station (Hakata Administration Annex) in the southern island of Kyushu. I was out of the Army in 1967 and was never deployed to Vietnam.
Although I’m a Vietnam-Era Veteran, I have absolutely no regrets that I was never stationed in Vietnam.
On March 29, 1975, Gerald Ford signed an executive order ending draft registration. I turned 18 in October of 1975, so I didn’t even have to register. While I felt relieved, I also felt some version of “survivor’s guilt” – not talking so much about people who actually got killed in Viet Nam (neither I nor my family knew anyone who had died there), but for all the people who had to go through the process, and particularly those who ended up being sent to Viet Nam. My brother-in-law was sent there, so I had some idea what the experience was like, both for the soldiers and for their families. (I still remember my sister crying softly after she finished a phone call from John.)
Snarkily ? I beg to differ. I was just being my usual lovable, obnoxious self. Your column brought back quite a few memories for me, too. In Sept. of 1969 I started college. By the end of day one I knew what I suspected all along, college was not for me. I just went to amuse my father, who like a lot of parents back then felt that unless you went to college you would never amount to more than a janitor’s helper. Not even a full fledged janitor. There was one big advantage to going to school back then. It was called a college deferment. As long as you stayed in school Uncle Sam couldn’t touch you. That’s probably why half the guys were going. But, if you dropped out or just stopped showing up like me, the school was required to inform your local draft board. There was a scene in Animal House where Dean Wormer tells the boys that they are all kicked out. He added that he was informing their local draft board that they were all eligible for military service. That caused Flounder to puke all over the Dean’s desk and the Dean himself.
By march of 1970 I couldn’t take another day of school. So, I took my chances and quit. Hey, I never claimed to be overly bright! In mid May I was lying in bed with a serious case of infectious mononucleosis . If you’ve ever had it you know what I mean. I thought I was gonna die. My mom came in my room with a long face and an envelope. She said this came for you and walked out. When I saw the return address, I knew why the long face. I opened it up and it started with ” Greetings from the president of the United States” Some how I figured out that it wasn’t a get well card from Tricky Dick ( Nixon, for you younger folks) It contained the time and date that I was to be at my local board in Manhasset. It explained that a bus would take us to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn where our draft physical would take place.
Wearing only our shorts and the stack of paper they gave us we were zipping along from station to station. I noticed that every doctor had on a white lab coat with a red and black pen in their pocket. When we got to the hearing part I didn’t realize that I was in for shock. My hearing was always fine. After he took an extra long time looking in my left ear he asked me for my paperwork and reached for his red pen. I almost wet myself. Sorry, son we can’t use you. You have a punctured ear drum. I wanted to kiss his ugly mug.
Tom mentioned showing up stoned or drunk for the big day. We were sitting in the back of the bus when this really weird mother asked us ” who wants to trip?” We all politely declined. Right as the bus was pulling in he dropped a hit of Brown Dot. We were only there for a short while when he asked to use the mens room. That was the last we saw of him for an hour or so. We were heading up the stairs for the written test when all of a sudden these 2 gorillas in army uniforms came down the stairs yelling for us to step aside now. In between them was you know who in cuffs being dragged away to parts unknown.
This comment is dedicated to Paul and Ralph who never came back from that Hell hole. And to Billy, who returned a stone cold junkie and died from an overdose 2 months after he returned.
Shaggy dog story.
meaning what?
What’s the matter, LC. You make a dumb remark and can’t explain it. Typical.