At a little after 11:30
PM the last of the bookworms made it out to the garden. He grabbed a cup and tried to squeeze the
last few ounces of beer from a floating keg.
“Everybody get their deferments re-upped today?”, he sang out,
confidently. Except for the final
strains of “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians, you could have heard a pin drop.
Suddenly, there was a mass exodus from the beer garden as
a dozen men scrambled up the hill to the frat house. Banging through the back door, my brothers
and I dashed to our rooms. We retrieved
our long overlooked forms from the Selective Service and hurriedly filled them
out as we raced to the parking lot.
Surprisingly, I was the most sober person in the group so
I was assigned “designated driver” duty and fired up my car as eleven of my
brothers stuffed themselves into my five-seater Malibu. It was pandemonium. Everyone was screaming and yelling and
encouraging me to drive like the wind to the central post office which was just
east of downtown. Normally this trip
would have taken 20 minutes. However,
because of the lateness of the hour, my total disregard for traffic lights and
an average speed in excess of 80 MPH on city streets, we made it in 10 minutes.
As we pulled into the front of the building and the boys
extricated themselves from a self-imposed sardine can, we sprinted into the
lobby of the post office. We were
screaming and yelling for anyone who might be inside the building. I glanced at my watch and it was already just
midnight . After about five minutes of chaos, Brian was
shouting for us to be quiet. We all
stopped hollering and finally heard a reassuring voice with the unmistakable accent of a black man, shouting
through the wall at us. “Do’n y’all
worry, boyz,” he said, “I’z gonna stamp ever one of ‘em twelve O’clock , midnight ”. The
thanks of a dozen, suddenly sober young men rang out but then the man behind
the wall said, “Let me axe you a pacific question”.
“What?”, we all said in unison.
“Why’d y’all dumb white boyz wait so long?” Without answering, we slunk silently into the
late summer night and drove home, thankful for the janitor with a heart.
As it turned out the draft lottery we all feared did not
come until December 1, 1969 . If you were born on September 14th,
you were the most assured of a trip to Southeast Asia. My birthdate, October 1st ended up
being # 359 out of 365. That meant, for
all practical purposes, I would have never been drafted. Leaving nothing to chance, I dropped out of
school and joined an airborne National Guard unit in 1967, one of only two in
the entire country. We were never called
up. By the end of 1966 there were over
385,000 troops in Vietnam, a number which escalated to a high of 536,000 in
1968. And yet, ironically,
60 % of eligible men escaped military service during the
Vietnam era. Despite this favorable
statistic, by the end of the war in 1972, over 70,000 draft evaders and
deserters were living in Canada.
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