by | May 10, 2014 | Stories
I remember the draft well. Pass all your classes, you keep a II-S deferment. Fail one class, I-A! One of my friends failed his English term paper because of run-on sentences and fragments. (Today your computer would catch those errors). He failed the class, was...
by | May 1, 2014 | Stories
Like B.C and A.D., the lottery divided my life on earth into two distinct parts: before this and after this. In advance of the lottery, military experts had informed us that people with numbers lower than about 150 were sure to be drafted. My number was 83....
by | Apr 24, 2014 | Stories
Five or six of us gathered in my Russell Hall dorm room at the University of Georgia. We didn’t have a TV, so we turned our radio up so as not to miss a date. The early dates were met with a hushed tension, but as the time scrolled on, most of us became more...
by | Mar 26, 2014 | Stories
Even though I got a relatively high number in the draft, I was still nervous about the impending pre-induction physical. When I went in to Fort Hamilton (in Brooklyn) for my "reguired by law pre-induction physical," all I could think about was, "How the...
by | Mar 24, 2014 | Stories
I graduated high school in 1968. Some of my friends volunteered for the Navy and Air Force to keep from being drafted into the Army and having to go to Vietnam. Others were drafted. I had two friends that walked point in Vietnam and lived to tell about it, although...
by | Mar 20, 2014 | Stories
I was a junior at Norwich University, a military college in Vermont (home and founder of ROTC) and was in ROTC with an expectation of going to either Germany or Vietnam. I chose to go to Norwich since if I had to go to Vietnam I wanted to go as an officer. I...
