GET THIS MAN OUTTA HERE!

GET THIS MAN OUTTA HERE!

In the fall of 1972 I was wanted by the FBI. My mother told me this, frantically, on the phone. I told her to calm down. She was rather freaked out by the FBI knocking on her door, as you might imagine. Two agents actually went to our house, showed their IDs, and asked where they could find me. I told her I had taken care of it, not to worry, and that it was just a big misunderstanding. I had just returned for my second year of college, and had to hang up because I was late for “Work Study”.

Work Study for me was climbing inside, literally, huge pans and stainless steel mixing bowls, in an attempt to clean them for the next day’s food preparation. I also ran the “macheen,” as my co-worker, Manny, called it, in between inserting myself into food-encrusted pots. My friends all worked in the offices around campus, or in the library. I made the mistake of putting my summer experience as a fry cook, on my Work Study application. For this, I was banished to dish and pot washing at the Connor Hall cafeteria to help pay my tuition. I was severely jealous of my fellow Work Study recipients, and I tried every semester to have my work assignment changed. It never happened. For those of you who never had Work Study, just so you know, your paycheck went directly to the Registrar’s Office to pay down your tuition bill.

The FBI was looking for me because I was a draft-dodger. I was ordered to report for the Armed Services Physical Examination in Casper, Wyoming in August 1972, but I didn’t show up. I didn’t show up because I told the 92-year-old lady at the Selective Service Office that I would be back in New Mexico by then, that I was getting married in September, and then returning to school. I asked her if it was possible for me to take the physical down there which was scheduled for the end of September. That was fine with her, she said, but maybe she said it because she secretly enjoyed getting us young men put on the FBI’s most wanted list. Not a lot of exciting stuff happening in that small town. I never got anything in writing, my first lesson with regard to that rule.

I was ordered to report for the Armed Services Physical Examination because I scored a low number in the annual Selective Service Draft. Your birth date became a lottery number 1-366 randomly pulled from two drums, one with the birth date and one with a number. So, for example, if September 10th was pulled from the one drum, and 127 pulled from the other, then everyone born on September 10th would have a lottery number of 127. Then you had a letter drawn, A-Z, to determine the last name order for each local board. Then you had the number of inductees needed by the armed services to meet troop levels.

My draft lottery took place on February 2, 1972, for those of us born in 1953. Nine days before my 19th birthday. All the Freshmen men sat around in the dorms that day, waiting for the numbers to be announced, like college football players waiting to be drafted, but we didn’t want to go in the first round. I got number 26. The year prior my birth date got 351. Just my luck. We had two big “winners” in the draft lottery on my floor of the dorm; a #3 and a #6. That afternoon they both got drunk and enlisted in the Army. If you enlisted, the theory was, you could have some control over your military career. The “control” part wasn’t really true, we later found out, and you served a four-year enlistment instead of the inductee’s three. There were other enticements they used, though, to get you to voluntarily sign up. One of them was the automatic induction if you didn’t show for the draft physical. The fact that you held a lottery number in the top third was still their best recruitment tool, however.

I started doing the math, not one of my strongest subjects, but I refused to cave. I knew, for example, that 49,514 men between the ages of 19 and 26 had been inducted in 1972. (There were an estimated 70,000 draft-evaders and deserters living in Canada by that time also.) I expected it to be less in 1973 since the induction number had dropped every year from 1969, when the first lottery was held since 1942. Prior to that, the draft, which was still in place, was done by oldest first.

So I still, in my feeble opinion, had a pretty good chance of not getting an induction notice even though my number was 26, depending on how many men were needed. In the 1970 draft the highest lottery number called was 125. So everybody with a higher number 126 through 366, and likely some individuals with #125 because of last name order, were not drafted. In 1970, 162,146 men were inducted through the draft. As a general rule, the Selective Service said that the upper third of the list would be inducted, the middle third would probably not, and the bottom third would definitely not have to forcibly tote a gun and wear green for three years.

Then there was President Richard Milhous Nixon, who campaigned for his second term on the promise to end the draft as soon as he was re-elected. Since he was also intending to withdraw from Viet Nam, I was putting my faith in the hope that the draft would indeed end in 1973, before my number came up.

So if Nixon didn’t follow through on this promise to end the draft and pull out of Vietnam, like most politicians once they get in office, then I still might have a chance of not being drafted since they would pull all eligible men from the other lower 25 lottery birthdays first to fill the quota. Where they got the quota from is something I was never able to determine, and wouldn’t it suck if you were the last man drafted? The last man drafted to make the 400,000 troop strength number, but you were really number four-hundred thousand and one. Would they let you go once they did the recount?

Registrants with low lottery numbers had to report for a physical, mental, and moral evaluation at a Military Entrance Processing Station to see if we were fit for military service. So that summer, after the draft lottery and my #26, I got the order to report for the Armed Services Physical Examination which was being held in Casper WY in August. I was home for the summer working at the Drive-Inn 4U, my now ill-fated food service experience.

I knew there was very little chance of me not being classified 1-A, but I was hearing about all kinds of ways to beat the draft. One that I actually heard a lot was that you could inject yourself with peanut butter to raise your blood pressure temporarily. I’m not sure how that worked. I can’t imagine peanut butter going through a syringe, but needles were out for me anyway. Another was simply to not register since it would take them a while to find you. Already missed that one, but it usually only took them a week to find you and then you risked immediate induction. You could say you were a homosexual (they weren’t “gay” yet). That would raise some eyebrows, but not always work, although some really practiced at it. I know of at least one lottery “winner” who just walked out of the physical. Many tried to score as low as possible on the mental segment of the test. That didn’t work either. Intelligence wasn’t a requirement to get shot at, I guess. I wasn’t going to be able to get that college deferment that filled up the universities during the 60s either, because they reformed the draft in 1971. You could only get a deferment now until the end of the current semester unless you were a senior, then they would allow you to finish the academic year. Still that could buy you some time if the draft was going to end before you were called up. And then there was my method, I just didn’t show up for the physical. It took the FBI two weeks to find me, probably because I was from a small town in northern Wyoming, still, not a very effective method of avoiding the draft, unless you were already packed and headed for British Columbia.

So I got it all straightened out by reporting to the local Selective Service Board in Las Vegas, NM, where they scheduled me for the physical at the end of September, in Albuquerque, Albuquerque being the closest MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station). We traveled there on a military “school” bus. You know the ones with the hard fiberglass seats. The trip was about 124 miles and would take us 2 hours. We were to arrive at the bus to leave by oh five hundred hours. Yeah, that’s five am.

Within 5 minutes of my arrival at the bus, I was elevated in rank. I was now responsible for the conduct of everyone on the bus, I was told. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to accomplish that, but it was clear that they had picked me because I was the smallest, weakest and least likely to keep order on that bus. In other words, they picked me, seated ignorantly in the front, for their entertainment. I didn’t know anyone on the bus, and most were Hispanic, talking amongst themselves in Spanish of which I couldn’t decipher a word. Well, not exactly true. I did know how to say phrases like, “This street is beautiful,” “Turn to page 3”, “Where’s the bathroom,” and “I want some more beans (or another beer), please,” among others. I didn’t hear any of those familiar phrases in the bus on the way to Albuquerque.

The trip was uneventful. I know this because I’m sure I would have mental scars from my attempts at maintaining order on the bus, and I don’t seem to have any. We disembarked on a downtown sidewalk in front of a tall brick building, and were ushered inside, up two flights of stairs, two abreast, to a classroom, where we were told to take a seat. That’s when the fun started. We were told what our day would entail, how long it would take, and how we were getting home. We were each handed a clipboard, told to fill out the information on the top of several forms, then we counted out in tens. Then the first group was, “stand up, shoulders back, follow me, single file, no talking,” the rest of us were to wait our turn.

The first thing I noticed was the yellow shoe prints on the floor in the hallways with “This Way” printed on each one, going in one direction, and back the other way on the other side of the hall. There were other directions on the shoe prints, like “Stop”, “Wait” “Go Left”, “Go Right”, I later discovered. It was like a yellow brick road. Follow the yellow shoe prints. They were on the floor in a normal stride, so you could actually step from shoe print to shoe print, and we all tried to do that, as we were led down the hallway. The heel and sole cutout must have been made from a size-13 shoe though, because it dwarfed my foot as I went from “This Way” to “This Way”.

The first station we came to was a blood pressure check. Four positions in an 8 X 8 cubicle, each manned by a soldier in a white smock, obviously with no medical experience, putting on the cuff, squeezing the bubble several times, releasing the pressure, making the reading, writing it down on the chart on the clipboard and we were told to follow the prints to the next station.

The next station was a vision check. We were told to read the middle line of an eye chart. While I was standing there trying to focus on it, I heard two different series of letters coming from the two men on either side of me. So, I just said “L M O 9 D G” without pausing. They checked me off. I either hit it perfectly without seeing them, or they really didn’t care whether I could see or not. After all, I was being tested to see if I was physically fit enough to be a target.

Follow the yellow shoe prints to the next booth and the next. Getting our ears looked at in one, our throats in the next. All in an assembly line system. All done very quickly and no one has failed yet, that I can tell. We follow the shoe prints to a door where we seem to be stacking up. The shoe print says “wait”. So we do. Up to this point we have stripped down to our pants, carrying our shirts and t-shirts with us along the trail. Finally the door opens and we are herded into a large room, a gymnasium. We follow the yellow shoe prints to a circle which runs around the center of the floor. There are now 30 of us. Three group of ten.

The sergeant yells for us to get out of our pants. Put our clothes in front of us, clipboard on top and face out from the circle. Several of us don’t understand the directions and are screamed at until we are all facing out, standing in only our tighty-whities (thank god I listened to my mother and am wearing clean underwear) or our colorful boxer shorts, but we try not to look at each other.

“Face forward,” the sergeant screams, and I mean screams, at the man next to me. My eyes are locked on the wall. He walks around the circle. I know he’s a sergeant because my Dad was one in the Army. He was a staff sergeant, and I’ve seen his stripes. I know this guy is at least a higher rank than a private.

“Drop your shorts around your ankles,” he screams. The room echoes. Then there is only the quiet shuffling sound of men dropping their drawers. I feel the cold air contracting the balls. “Arms, at your sides,” he screams. Then he walks from man to man around the circle, telling them to turn their head and cough, as a doctor-type follows and writes whatever result they are trying to determine on each man’s clipboard. I found out he wasn’t just following. He was actively involved in poking his fingers half way through your lower abdomen while you were turned and coughing.

“Everybody turn around. One eighty. Do it now! Keep eyes front. Bend over and grab your ankles!” I’m sure that was a sight. You could hear a pin drop after that order was executed. Then footsteps, stop, footsteps, grunt, footsteps, stop. They’re behind me, groping where I would rather not they grope, and then they move on. I assume I’m an acceptable asshole. I don’t move. Footsteps. Stop. Footsteps. Stop.

“GET THIS MAN OUTTA HERE!”

Someone has obviously come up with a unique way of getting out of the draft. We all strain looking up-side-down through our knees to see what’s going on. We must have looked like a flock of ostriches. The only thing I can make out is a naked guy with his drawers at his ankles waddling quickly out of the room dragged by his arm. The double doors open and shut and he is gone.

“Don’t anybody move!” our leader screams. The review continues, and then we are told to turn back around pull up our shorts, and get dressed. We follow the yellow foot prints and amazingly end up walking down the hall we started in and turning into the classroom where we began. We are told to turn in our clipboards and take a seat. The “mental” part of the test is ready to begin.

To Be Continued………