I graduated high school in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1966 at the height of the war. My first year of college at St. Norbert in DePere, I was required to take ROTC because the school was so small they needed all the freshmen and sophomores to mandatorily take it to justify the program. When I transferred to Madison in 1967 I decided to continue in ROTC because I figured I would be drafted anyway and I would rather be an officer than an enlisted man. While I asked to be a medical services corps officer, everyone in my class ended up being assigned as infantry, artillery or armor officers. I was assigned to the infantry. The senior graduate from my ROTC class (a very rah rah kind of guy at school) was in the Infantry Officer Basic class at Ft. Benning after mine and we overlapped a few weeks. Turns out he some how got himself assigned to the reserves and I went to Vietnam! Oh well. It was an interesting experience. Today I live in Northern Virginia and and I am Deputy Director of the Compensation and Pension Service of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Service administers a $45 billion benefits program for disabled veterans. I fondly remember my days at Wisconsin and, although in ROTC, I attended many parties of classmates who flunked their entrance physicals when they were drafted.
