Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Here.
Were you draftable during the Vietnam era? What's your story?
UPDATE (4/23)
A correspondent and I both lament the non-inclusion of a certain period piece by Country Joe and the Fish. Said correspondent points out that the CJF tune is based on Louis Armstrong, Muskrat Ramble from 1926.
by
Tags:
Draftable. Lottery number 138. They didn’t get that far. I would have been in the combat engineers, probably. I had already taken the heavy equipment class at the Ag school at Cal Poly.
I was drafted. Army, not Marine, but I remember this more than any music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH2vbYs6ebc
Thanks, Joe, glad to hear your story after all these years. I assume you took the pre-induction physical and passed. Where did you take it and when?
Around the time of the Tet Offensive in early ’68 I received a letter from the Selec Serv Admin ordering me to downtown Los Angeles for my pre-induction physical. I flunked the hearing test because of the birth defect you know about. I was classified 1-Y which was later changed to 4-F.But I had already snagged a Cal State Scholarship and had been admitted to LMU, so that would have kept me safe for four years at least had I passed the exam. I believe the lottery draft kicked in in 1970.
We are both lucky: highly sensitive and intelligent guys that we are, we were prime candidates for psychological destruction, had we ended up in the thick of it. You know what happened to our classmate Vince Regan.
Did we as a nation learn anything from Vietnam? I don’t think so.
This is the place to insert a tribute to Jack Britt, boyhood friend of Joe and me, older than us, a lot ballsier, a mntor is some way and in others a bad influence. A paratrooper in Vietnam, he earned the nickname, “Jumpin Jack Flash.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXUJMaYzh6U
RIP, Jack.
Thanks, Okie, for linking to that powerful video. And thank you for your service.
Bill – This entire thread brought back a host of memories that I will not bore you with (:-), except to mention that, in order to avoid the draft, 3 friends and myself volunteered with the Air Force in 1966. I spent a year in Texas for basic training and tech school – taking courses euphemistically called ‘Air Traffic Control” but which actually taught us to read encrypted radio signals (Air Traffic) that dealt with matters involving the movement of Vietnamese V.I.P.’s and troops. Then a year at Clark Air Base in the Phillipines and a year or so on a base in S. Vietnam performing that task.
The music you shared was playing constantly when we weren’t working. It filled the air along with the smoke of Pot and regular tobacco. Yeah we had to dodge the occasional incoming rocket, but all in all we sort of enjoyed it. Lots of good stories.
Leave a Reply