How Arlo Guthrie and I Lost The War
By
John T. Lockwood
Freedom is the right to
yell ‘Theater!’ in a crowded fire.
-- Abbie
Hoffman
Remember, kiddies, don’t
forget to smash the State!
-- Snappy
Sammy Smoot
When I was a lad the US Government
had a very serious program designed to disrupt the lives of those of us who
asked only that the damn government leave us alone. It was called the Selective
Service System -- more commonly the Draft. Passed as an emergency measure just
before the Second World War as a response to Hitler's berserk shenanigans, the
Government was, in the 1960's, using it to provide raw material for their
out-of-control war policy in Southeast Asia. They dragged young lads right off
the streets and trained them to kill people. It was a remarkable time. If you
refused to learn the gay art of doing to death one’s fellow passengers on
Spaceship Earth by attacking them with rifle fire, high explosives, or sharp
instruments, they put you into jail, in the belief that you were a danger to
society. If, however, you agreed to learn these various forms of murder, you
were sent to "training camp" -- a place where you underwent the
ludicrous experience of being screamed at by redneck quasi-literates about
whether your bed was made properly, your shoes shined to a requisite buff, or
your footlocker tidied sufficiently. This was thought to prepare you for mortal
combat, and after enduring six weeks or so of it, you were sent to Vietnam to
get shot to pieces. This was called "turning young boys into men" and
stuffing men into body bags.
The draft was one royal pain
and was fundamentally incompatible with a free society. All kinds of reasons
were put forward by the Government and by conservative geeks as to why the
draft was necessary and even good. I actually heard at the time one
self-righteous conservative babble this counsel to young people, "Living
in a free society doesn't mean you can do what you want -- it means you've got
to do what you're told." God, I wish I could remember that guy’s name.
On the way home from school
one day I got off the bus in downtown Yonkers and walked into the South
Broadway Professional Building to register for the draft. It was about a week
after JFK was assasinated and right around Thanksgiving. The bespectacled,
heavily perfumed, matron at the desk informed me coldly that I was some thirty
days late and therefore had to fill out a "delinquent" affidavit in
addition to the usual form. The regular form requested my name, address, date
of birth, my daytime and nighttime phone numbers, place of employment or
school, its phone number and so forth. The delinquent affidavit asked for
precisely the same stuff but also had some thirty lines in which I could write
down, in my own words, why I had neglected to register for the Selective Service
in a timely manner. I wrote in block letters the single word "FORGOT"
and handed back the papers. Amazingly, this suited Miss Penny Perfume just
fine. I walked out into the late fall evening, into the very first days of
Johnson Administration clutching my newly minted draftcard. I was eligible to
help plucky little America on her road to World dominion and to defend her, if
so called upon, against small, impoverished, Asian nations the size of New
Jersey.
I received my draft notice
ordering me to appear for a physical exam in December of '66. As they wanted me
to report to New York City for my exam and I was at school in the middle of a
semester near Buffalo, I wrote to them asking for a delay until late May or
June. They apparently felt the war would be around for a while and let me wait
until June 20, 1967.
This was now the absolute
height of the Vietnam War. The Tet Offensive, which broke the back of US policy
and made clear that the war was irretrievably lost, still lay nine months in
the future. Lyndon Baines Johnson, successor to the martyred John F. Kennedy,
was the President of the United States. He still enjoyed some support for the
war among the general public. It was widely believed that the next year -- 1968
-- which was an election year, would see Johnson renominated by the Democratic
Party and reelected by a public content with his policies. The massive and ugly
anti-war demonstrations that would rock the country, and for which the decade
of the sixties would come to be remembered, had not yet really developed. There
were protests going on, all right, but they were sporadic and largely confined
to the hard left, the commies. There was little organized opposition to the
draft.
The hot weather descending on
the country on my scheduled draft physical day that June was not expected to
harbinger, in the parlance of the times, a "long, hot summer".
Indeed, this summer of 1967 would become known as the "Summer of
Love" -- a sort of hippie pilgrimage to the Holy City of San Francisco --
a festival during which Timothy Leary would enunciate his "turn on, tune
in, drop out" mantra for the New Age. "Turn on, tune in, drop
out" was hardly a call to arms. In fact, it sounded more like Leary was
advocating a policy of peaceful resignation, which, more or less, he was. The Greening
of America by Charles A. Reich, would soon hit the bookshelves. Its advice
on the war and the civil rights struggle? Do nothing. Grow your hair long and
wear love beads. That’ll show ‘em.
At the time, I felt that the
war would last forever. I saw no way of winning it short of physically
conquering North Vietnam and occupying the whole country like the Germans
occupied Poland in the 40's. This would keep us there indefinitely, with our
troops all potential victims of snipers and hit-and-run attacks throughout many
years. Short of this drastic policy of conquest, we could fight on interminably
against the patient Victor Charley, never getting anywhere near that elusive
end of the tunnel. In Vietnam we were shorn of our superior fire power. Charley
wasn't going to come out and fight in the open where our military could blast
him dead with our billion-dollar weapons systems. He picked and chose his
fights, always selecting a time and place to his great advantage. He was
numberless, he was faceless, he was fearless, and, oh yeah,he was winning.
Into this milieu came my draft
physical day. I reported early in the morning for the physical at the draft
office in Yonkers. There were about thirty or so of us. We were piled onto a
bus and driven down to the most famous induction and physical exam center in
the country – Whitehall Street in New York City. This was the induction center
that was made famous by Arlo Guthrie in his long monologue Alice's Restaurant at the Newport jazz festival in
Rhode Island the previous year and which would be released as a recording later
that very summer. The Whitehall Street center was a large square building that
had clearly been a public school in a previous, kinder incarnation. It appeared
as though it had been built in the late 19th century and was, perforce,
reaching the end of its useful life. After serving for years as a learning
center for youngsters it now served to haul them off to war. It had plaster
walls from which old fashioned gas jets, duly capped, still jutted. Its wood
floors creaked and groaned and echoed every footstep. Windows were mostly tall
and wood framed and required window poles to open and close them. The building
was – no pun intended – drafty.
We were dumped off the bus and
ushered into one of the old classrooms where an army officer – short, round and
bored – told us of the adventure to come. He was mostly concerned that we would
get fed on the US Army and bussed back to whence we came on a US Army bus.
Later, after the exam, they carefully counted us as we boarded the bus. This
was, I guess, their way of making sure that nobody disappeared on them midway
through the festivities. After the officer’s oratio gravis, we were led
into another classroom where we filled out a long questionnaire. We had to tell
them who are mommies and daddies were, where we lived, and what diseases we had
had and when. We also had to tell them if there were any condition which, in
our opinion, disqualified us for the draft. I filled out the form and wrote
down that I had chronic asthma, which, in my opinion, disqualified me for the
draft. I was also scared of getting shot in the full flower of my youth for
someone’s warped foreign policy, but that constituted an opinion, which in my
condition, disqualified me for the draft, instead of the other way around, so I
couldn’t put that down on the form. Then, the fun began.
We were all herded into a sort
of locker room and given bags into which we were to put our valuables. I put my
cheap watch and wallet in there and my Zippo cigarette lighter (despite asthma
I occasionally smoked in those days) on which a friend who knew how to do such
things had engraved "Close Cover Before Striking". We then had to
strip down to our skivvies and sit there and wait. We would do rather a lot of
waiting this day. The room adjoined a bathroom and after sitting around doing
nothing for a while, I decided to use the facilities to take a leak. This
turned out the be a big mistake, as time would demonstrate. Eventually, we were
marched into the Big Room where the physical got under way.
An odd-looking
twenty-something was assigned to weigh us each and measure our height. It would
have been helpful if he knew how to use the equipment. He measured me at
6’3" and weighed me at 140 pounds. He wrote down on my papers that I was 5
pounds underweight. How he figured that, I don’t know. He had my height off by
two inches too much and weight off by twenty-odd pounds too little, but I
decided not to argue the point. I had to get blood taken next. I wasn’t looking
forward to this after getting a load of the overall competence of the scales
guy, to say the least. There were three or four people drawing blood and you
went to the first available. Amazingly, the sneering, snarling, little twerp to
whom I was sent for this procedure performed it with no trouble. Relief! After
the blood bit (two guys fainted), we were led into a room that had a large open
urinal and were handed cups. Egad, I had drained myself less than ten minutes
before! What was I to do? "Geez, I just took a leak a few minutes
ago!", I said as I stood before the urinal, cup in hand and helpless,
"I can’t do it!" "Want some?", the guy next to me said.
What? Borrow someone’s urine? How did I get into this situation?
"Uh…you got any diseases?", I replied somewhat thoughtlessly.
"Nope", he said. He was a big, healthy looking guy with a fully
functional bladder. I furtively looked about to see if any of the soldiers were
watching. They weren’t. They had probably seen more guys pee than they ever
wanted to in their lives. I held out my cup. What followed was not the proudest
nor the most pleasant moment of my life, I can tell you, but it got the job
done.
I marched with my dixie cup of
purloined pee to the guy who was interested in this stuff. He stuck what
appeared to be a strip of litmus paper into it and instructed me to return to
the urinal to discard the contents and then place my cup into the receptacle
that someone had thoughtfully labeled, "EMPTY pee cups go here".
Those were the exact words. We then were ordered, five at a time, into the
Jumping Room.
The Jumping Room was
everyone’s favorite. Just as we were getting accustomed to parading around with
a bunch of other guys in our undies, we found ourselves in the Jumping Room
where we were told to shed our underwear. The Jumping Room Commander [the JRC]
asked the five young lads to jump first on one foot, then the other.
Buck-naked, we five jumped on our right foot, then on our left while the JRC
carefully observed us. We were holding our papers in our hands while this was
going on. After a few minutes of this odd diagnostic procedure, the JRC figured
that his charges would do anything they were told. To test this theory, he told
us to place our papers on the floor. We did as we were told. Then the JRC told
us to turn around, face the wall away from him and bend over. We did as we were
told. Then the JRC ordered us, "Spread your cheeks!". Incredibly, we
did as we were told. There was, apparently, no end to our subservience. Satisfied
that we were Army material, he allowed us to redon our skivvies. Before we were
marched out, he took my papers, marked them with something and ordered me to an
MD who had a desk to the side of, but not out of, the Jumping Room. I went over
to this section and sat waiting on a bench. This gave me the opportunity to
observe the next five prospects as they were led into the presence of the JRC
and went dirty dancing. Ugh, but like a bad car wreck, it was hard not to look
at.
The five new recruits did as
they were told also. The JRC, an officious, self-important dude, placed his
hand to his jaw and carefully scanned the panorama during the spread ‘em phase
of the exam. What was he looking for, I wondered. Would he ever find it?
Indeed, what are we all looking for in this life? Whatever it was, if it were
to be found where he was looking, I decided I didn’t want any. Eventually, my
turn came to see the MD for God-knows-what the JRC thought he saw. "Your
feet hurt?", said the MD. He was an obese, balding guy who was sweating
profusely. He looked like the type who was always sweating. "No", I
said. He glanced down at my feet. "Got a good arch", he said.
"Thanks", I said. "You shouldn’t have been sent here", he
said. The JRC, hearing this, went into a snit. "I did NOT refer that man
to you!", he announced, indignation bristling throughout his vocabulary.
He had, of course. It was a matter of indifference to me, as I didn’t have any
immediate plans that I had to put on hold to wait at the foot-guy’s table, but I
was getting a bit fatigued by the nasty, attitude of these lifer-dog army
geeks. "Don’t pay any attention to him", I said to Dr. Foot, "he
got carried away because he loves his job." To my surprise, the foot-guy
laughed and waved me out of the Jumping Room. I left, never to return.
Next, I got to talk to some MD
about my asthmatic condition. As I spoke to him, his face was a study in
who-gives-a-shit. Bored, he told me to get a statement from my family doctor
for my draft board as I was found sufficiently healthy otherwise to join the
Army and bed down with fire ants in the ‘Nam. One guy said he was a homosexual
and they asked him if he was "practicing". After some confusion, he
realized that the answer to this was "yes", and he was sent off to the
shrink to see if he was crazy, or what. I had a cure for him – make him go back
and watch the goings-on in the Jumping Room for a while. That would get him
over his problem. Another guy claimed that he was too stupid to be in the army,
but they didn’t seem to be buying it. They didn’t think there was any such
thing. Yet, at the start of this whole affair, they had assigned one of the
examinees to accompany this poor soul around the building to see that he didn’t
get lost.
We were ushered back into the
locker room. Our little bag of valuables was given back to us. My engraved
lighter was gone, but my wallet, watch and money (I had $4.00) was there and I
felt like a human being again once my clothes were back on. Once redressed, we
were brought into a classroom and given test papers and free pencils with which
to fill them out.
The written exam started out
with a vocabulary test that I aced, of course. It moved on to a simple math
exam (You pay 3 quarters for a magazine that costs 55 cents, how much change do
you get? ) The questions were all multiple choice. To help the testee, each
section of the exam was preceded by a sample question to show how easy it all
was. The last part of the exam apparently was designed to test one’s mechanical
ability or handiness, perhaps. In this part, there was a picture of a tool and
then there were four other items displayed, one of which best ‘went with’ that
tool. They might have shown as an example a hammer, and you would pick a nail
as the object that best went with it. Except they didn’t do that. The sample
question showed a tool that I could not identify and then displayed a faucet, a
wall socket, something that looked like a trapeze, and a plumb weight. I didn’t
understand the damn sample question! Other guys in the room who had been
grunting and sweating through the vocabulary and math exams were now breezing
away through this one, while I stared in befuddlery at the test. My older
brother told me that at his physical, there was some guy who claimed, "I
don’t read". That was how he put it, "I don’t read." They all
blew up at him and said that he did too read, but the guy stuck to his
story. "We'll check with your school!",they threatened. "Go
ahead", he replied, "I don’t read." .
I was sent to lunch after the
exam. Off I went to the assigned room number, figuring, after the mechanical
part of the written exam, that I had at least kept myself out of the motor
pool. Lunch was provided gratis in a classroom. Some soldier handed me a box as
I walked in and rubber-stamped my papers with "HAD LUNCH". I sat down at a
school desk and ate it. It was a ham and swiss sandwich on rye with a dollop of
mustard on it. There was can of coke and a scooter pie provided as well. Hungry, I glommed it down greedily.
After lunch, things got
boring. I had to take the hearing test which was done in a kind of phone booth.
With earphones on my head, I was asked to press a button when I first detected a
pinging noise. The pinging started inaudibly and only very gradually intruded into one's awareness. This test was not exactly a compelling experience, I can tell you. I must have been in there for the better part of an hour of this, my mind wandering off several times, making me neglect to push the button. The test results must have been somewhat erratic, but no one said anything to me about it afterwards. A standard wall-chart eye exam was given. I read off DEFPOTEC on the appropriate
line and was passed. I was young and could see in those days.
The last section was the Character Exam. You were asked to state whether you had ever belonged to a long list of "subversive" organizations. These were almost exclusively left wing breakfast clubs like the Young Socialists of the World, the Third World Liberation Front and suchlike. The Government didn’t care if you belonged to the National Renaissance White Peoples’ Party, the New Soldiers of the Confederacy, or to the Society for the Preservation of Aryan Purity. But if you were just some poor fool who thought that socialism would work if only the right kind of socialism were ever tried, they classed you a turncoat. I looked for the Bernadine Rae Dohrn Fan Club, of which I was a local chapter president, but it wasn’t on the list of proscribed organizations.
Eventually, we got back on our bus and were brought back to the real world. In the end, as it turned out, the draft was very easy to beat. In fact, I still feel that if you failed to beat the draft during the Vietnam era, you were nothing but a chicken-hearted coward, unwilling to do your bit to End The War. I beat the draft in the usual way, I got a medical deferral. Middle-class and reasonably well-off, I had a medical history of asthma in my early teen years that I could wave at the draft board, making them gasp for air, turn blue, and faint dead away.
By the time my younger brother reported for his physical, the Government-run press gang at Whitehall Street didn't want any upper middle-class kids at all. They were too much trouble. I believe that they had actually started to look for reasons to get rid of you at the physical exam after the Vietnam war protests grew to critical mass. After finding that my brother was going to plead guilty to tennis elbow to try to get out of the draft, they pretended to find a "cyst" near his spine and flunked him for that, instead. He was a tennis champion in the prime of youthful health at the time.
My youngest brother was draft-eligible only after the lottery system came in. This was supposed to be the "fair" way to draft people that didn't give an advantage to the well-off. Actually, it was an admission of defeat. They retained the student deferments, medical excuses, hardship cases, and so forth. Sensing that the Selective Service System was staggering around on rubber legs, my youngest brother fiddled around and delayed things until it fell down all by itself. He never got near being drafted. My brothers and I had plenty of company as draft
dodgers. The long list of soon to be famous draft evaders includes most of the politicians of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush era. In addition to Chairman Bill, you can count Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Phil Gramm and many others among those who found convenient methods of beating the draft. They thus voted with their entire bodies against the war, no matter what they said later about it. Phil Gramm, for instance, the conservative GOP senator from Texas, played the student deferment game, exactly like Bill Clinton for whom he always expressed such boundless contempt. In Phil Gramm’s mind, if he has one, the fact that he
supported the war in Vietnam while evading it, while Bill Clinton was opposed to it, makes his own draft dodging honorable, and Bill Clinton’s dishonorable. It is difficult to imagine the reasoning that went into that opinion, but that it what he said to reporters when he was confronted during his abortive campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996. It speaks well of
rank and file Republicans that Gramm, despite heavy money and endorsements from the likes of Charlton Heston -- chief spokesman for the nation's trigger happy -- failed to get out of single digits throughout the primaries.
The US Government fought the Vietnam war like a monkey with a tommy gun, leaping about, frightened at its own mayhem-making. Nothing made sense. The USA involvement in Vietnam began in the Eisenhower administration, was expanded by Kennedy, and was brought to a full boil by Johnson. By the time Nixon got into office, the Vietnam War was a hopeless policy from which nothing could be salvaged. Nixon's Prime Minister,
Henry Kissinger, actually believed that he could unite the country behind a "reasonable" policy designed to gradually reduce our immediate involvement over the course of several years. It says much about how out-of-touch Kissinger and the rest of the Nixon gang were, that they thought there was such a thing as a "reasonable" Vietnam policy after 1968. After Tet, after all those self-immolated Buddhist monks,after all those zippo-raided villages, after all those draftcard burning, obscenity shouting, cop fighting, roaring, screaming antiwar protesters, after all those kids running off to Canada or Europe to evade the draft, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to say, "Here we go, kids, here's a nice, new policy that will keep us in
the 'Nam for maybe the next dozen years or so." My God, weren’t these fools paying any attention? It was too late for "reasonable" policies behind which the country could unite.
Opposition to the war had by 1968 congealed, solidified. Any policy that left America involved at all in Southeast Asia drew immediate and uncompromising hostility from one sector of the population, and groans of resignation from the rest. Under Nixon, Vietnam war policy lurched clumsily from stratagem to stratagem. Even the reasons given by the Administration for fighting the war evolved in goofy directions, changing every week. Official lying, which all governments do incessantly even
in quieter times, burgeoned utterly out of control. The Nixon administration invented the term "inoperative" to apply to statements made by administration officials, the falsity of which had subsequently been demonstrated beyond deniability. This was lying on an epic scale. It was about important things, life and death. People today get exercised over Clinton lying about getting a blowjob from a bimbo who happily took a nosedive for his lap the first time she got in a room alone with him. Who cares about that crap? Everybody, male and female, lies about blowjobs. Johnson and Nixon and their respective yes-men lackeys were telling lies that got hundred of thousands of
people killed.
But in the end, I beat the draft. So, what did I do in the war, kids? Well, I smoked too many cigarettes and drank too many beers and worked at a boring series of jobs in the financial industry, but at least I didn’t kill anybody. Good night and God bless, and remember, kiddies -- as Snappy Sammy Smoot observed -– don’t forget to smash the State!
FIN
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10 February 2001